A €460m casino, a White House, and one empty field
The Venue
Richard Quirke - owner of Dr Quirkey's Good Time Emporium in Dublin, one of the country's richer men, and a native of Thurles - announced in 2007 that he intended to build Ireland's first Las Vegas-style resort on 800 acres beside the M8 at Two-Mile Borris. The plan was extraordinary: a super-casino, a 500-room hotel, an all-weather horse-racing and greyhound track, an eighteen-hole golf course, a 15,000-capacity entertainment venue, a helipad, and a full-size replica of the White House to function as a banqueting facility and wedding venue. An Bord Pleanála granted planning permission in June 2011 - refusing only the music venue on grounds of rural inappropriateness. The Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, ruled the casino element out four months later. Enabling legislation was promised, debated, delayed, and finally published in a form that excluded the Two-Mile Borris development. The planning permission expired in 2018. Quirke had reportedly been continuing to purchase land in the area for years, but nothing was ever built. The field is still there, flat and unremarkable, beside a motorway.
Norman ground
The tower house
The 16th-century tower house on the western approach to the village is one of Tipperary's less-celebrated examples of a very common Tipperary building type. What marks it out is condition and detail: bartizans intact, the main structure solid, and a ring-work enclosure nearby that suggests an earlier fortification on the same spot. The Normans named the place - Borris from their word for a fortified borough - and their built evidence is still standing in a farmyard. There is no sign for it. You see it as you drive in, and that is probably the right way to encounter it.
The name, the measure, the game
Two miles from Thurles
The Irish mile that gives the village its name measured 2,240 yards - about 27% longer than the statute mile. Two Irish miles put you somewhere between 3.7 and 4 kilometres from Thurles's town centre. The actual road distance is closer to 7 kilometres, which tells you something about how the roads were laid. Thurles, 7km north, is where the GAA was founded in 1884 in Hayes Hotel. Two-Mile Borris is in the gravitational field of that fact. The whole stretch of country is.