Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council will today deny claims by an environmentalist that it is using mechanical diggers to demolish ancient ruins in the way of the M50 at Carrickmines Castle, Co Dublin.
Mr Conleth Bradley, counsel for the local authority, told Mr Justice Michael Peart in the High Court yesterday that work being carried out on the site was an archaeological excavation in accordance with directions from the Minister for the Environment.
"This is not a demolition in the way it has been portrayed to the court. It is an archaeological process being carried out in the most ordinary fashion and significant parts of the national monument are being retained in situ," Mr Bradley said.
He added that he had been given strict instructions by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to inform the court it intended to continue with the work while meeting the constitutional challenge to Section 8 of the month-old National Monuments (Amendment) Act.
The application was a direct challenge to the constitutionality of the legislation and in particular Section 8.
Until the matter was determined by the court there was legal authority that the presumption of constitutionality applied to the Act.
Mr Bradley said that there was general agreement between himself, Mr James Connolly SC, counsel for the Minister for the Environment, and Mr Coleman FitzGerald SC, counsel for environmentalist Mr Dominic Dunne, who is seeking to halt work on the site pending the determination of his constitutional challenge, to have a full trial on the issue next Thursday and Friday.
Mr FitzGerald said his client had instructed him to seek an interlocutory injunction restraining the work.
Even before the end of next week the national monument his client sought to protect could be demolished and the legal proceedings would then have no practical significance.
Mr Justice Peart said it was undesirable that there be a race between the diggers and the courts.
All he had been told in sworn evidence to date was that there were diggers on site that had the capacity to destroy the monument.
If that happened before the proceedings were heard they would be moot.
Adjourning the matter until this morning, he said it would be helpful to the court if the local authority submitted sworn affidavits overnight of evidence as to what exactly was happening at the site.