Tara Hill, County Meath, Ireland - Motorway

Motorway Near Tara Desecrates Sacred Landscape

The Irish Times - Saturday, March 1, 2008

POET AND Nobel laureate Séamus Heaney has described the M3 motorway as a ruthless desecration of the sacred landscape around the Hill of Tara, in a BBC documentary to be broadcast today at 11.30am on Radio Ulster, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

In the same programme, Dr Jonathan Foyle, British chief executive of the World Monuments Fund, which placed Tara on its endangered sites list last year, likened the motorway to the destruction by Afghanistan%u2019s Taliban regime in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

In his interview with BBC reporter Diarmaid Fleming, Prof Heaney said the motorway %u201Cliterally desecrates an area - I mean the word means to desacralise%u2019 and, for centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred gound%u201D.

Referring to the 1916 Proclamation having summoned the Irish people %u201Cin the name of the dead generations%u201D, he said: %u201CIf ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times . . . it was Tara%u201D.

Prof Heaney added: %u201CI suppose Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks or maybe Stonehenge to an English person or Nara in Japan . . .It conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal.

%u201CThe traces on Tara are in the grass, in the earth. They aren%u2019t spectacular like temple ruins in Greece but they are about origin, they%u2019re about beginning, they%u2019re about the mythological, spiritual source - something that gives the country its distinctive spirit.%u201D

He recalled that WB Yeats, George Moore and Arthur Griffith had written a letter to The Irish Times (below) complaining that the British Israelites, who thought the Ark of the Covenant was buried at Tara, were desecrating a %u201Cconsecrated landscape%u201D by digging there.So, I thought to myself, if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what%u2019s happening to that whole countryside being ripped up [for the M3] is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work,%u201D Prof Heaney said.

According to Dr Foyle, the entire Tara complex %u201Cis the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations and Canterbury for its Christian associations all rolled into one%u201D yet it was being destroyed %u201Cto shave 20 minutes off a journey time%u201D.

http://tarawatch.org/?m=200803

Please sign this petition, the aim is to stop the desecration of a sacred place of natural beauty.  All signatures much appreciated & this will be going to Irish Authorities.