Do you remember when Fairies used to cause major disruption to roads? No not me and me husband in July. In 1999, engineers building a motorway through County Clare found themselves facing an occult obstacle no survey had flagged. A single hawthorn tree, standing alone in a field at Latoon, just outside Newmarket-on-Fergus. Lone hawthorns are not to be fecked with. Cut down as part of a hedgerow, they're just trees. But solo in open ground, they become a sceach, a fairy bush, believed to mark the meeting point of ancient fairy paths or bealaí sí. These are the invisible routes the Aos Sí travel between one stronghold and the next. Interfere with one, and you invite misfortune. Interfere with one sitting on a fairy path, and you're inviting a supernatural shitstorm. The Latoon bush had the misfortune of standing right in the path of the planned N18. Road crews arrived to clear it when word reached Eddie Lenihan, a seanchaí who'd spent decades collecting stories like this one from farmers and neighbours across Munster. A local had once told him this particular bush marked a meeting ground between the fairy hosts of Munster and Connacht. This was some inter Provincial business. Disturbing it wouldn't just curse whoever swung the chainsaw. It would curse the road itself. Lenihan went to the press and story went international. And somewhere along the line, the people actually responsible for building a motorway through Clare decided the safer bet was to build around a bush rather than risk finding out whether an angry crowd of nationwide Fay folk could really enforce some fairy FAFO. The N18 was redrawn and what should have been a straightforward stretch of motorway ended up delayed for close to ten years while the alignment was reworked to leave the tree untouched. When it finally opened as the M18, the hawthorn was still standing exactly where it always had, in the median strip near junction 11, close enough to the tarmac that trucks doing a hundred kilometres an hour pass within a few metres of it every day.