The National Roads Authority (NRA) has welcomed a High Court decision not to allow environmental campaigners seek a judicial review of the work on the M50 motorway at Carrickmines Castle.
Mr Justice Paul Gilligan this morning refused campaigner Mr Michael Mulcreevy leave to seek a judicial review and also refused to grant an injunction which would halt the work at the site.
Speaking to ireland.com, Mr Michael Egan, head of corporate affairs at the NRA, said he believed Mr Justice Gilligan's judgment was "very strong" and that he hoped the environmental campaigners would take heed of this.
"I hope the message will sink in," he said. Mr Egan said the NRA had complied with the law and the National Monuments Act in overseeing the work on the intersection at the medieval site at Carrickmines.
He hoped there would be no further challenges to the construction of this final phase of the M50 because the public had been inconvenienced long enough.
"We have lost a year from a number of factors, including this protest," Mr Egan said. He estimated the extra cost incurred as a result of the challenge to the Carrickmines work to be around €10 million.
He said the original road design had been planned in such a way as to avoid the one-and-a-half acre area site that was believed to contain the remains of the castle proper. However, following more than two years of excavations costing €6 million, the remains of the castle proper had not yet been found.
Significant sections of the remains that had been found would be left intact following the construction of the new motorway, while others would be recorded or even reconstructed block by block, Mr Egan added.
He said he hoped the road could be completed by September 2005. The deadline was optimistic, "but it is now very much in our sights", he added.
The main area of attention for archaeologists now will be the Glenamuck Road. A temporary road diverting traffic from this road will be constructed while this work takes place.
The Carrickminders group obtained an injunction halting the work on the site in February of last year on the grounds that the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, had not signed an order permitting it to go ahead.
The NRA also faces a challenge to the construction of the Clonee-to-Kells bypass on the N3, which environmental campaigners claim passes too close to the historic Hill of Tara site. Some of those involved in the Carrickmines challenge are now backing the Tara campaign.
Mr Egan said a 28-day oral hearing had taken all concerns, including environmental and heritage concerns, into account and that the new road would be twice as far from the Hill of Tara as the existing N3.