Heaney hits out over 'tar on Tara'

Diarmaid Fleming
BBC News

The construction of a motorway by the Irish Government through one of Ireland's most historic areas has been condemned in a BBC Radio Ulster documentary, Tar on Tara, by the country's foremost poet, Seamus Heaney, and other international experts.

The M3 motorway is well under construction through the lush green and historical countryside of County Meath.

Ireland's biggest ever road project stretches 61km and is expected to cost around 800m euros.

The road under construction will run through the Tara Skreen valley, an area which has been of historical and religious significance in Ireland for thousands of years, with archaeological finds dating back to 4000BC.

The Tara complex is bounded by the Hill of Tara, seat of the ancient High Kings of Ireland, and a place of sacred worship in both pagan and Christian times.

Because the area represents such a long continuum of history - compared to other world famous monuments such as Stonehenge covering a shorter period of time - archaeologists say Tara is of extreme value in world terms.

Each generation has followed the next in their reverence for the area, allowing archaeological experts to tell the story of civilisation in Ireland, as well as historical and religious worship, through the messages in its landscape and the artefacts left in its soil.

Neither the National Roads Authority (NRA) nor the Irish minister for transport and local Meath TD Noel Dempsey were prepared to be interviewed for the documentary.

He said: "I was reading around recently and I discovered that WB Yeats and George Moore, two writers at the turn of the century and Arthur Griffith, wrote a letter to the Irish Times sometime at the beginning of the last century because a society called the British Israelites had thought that the Arc of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill.

"And they wrote this letter and they talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what is happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work."

Mr Heaney said that the Celtic Tiger was attacking the ancient symbol of Ireland, the harp.

"It will be a sort of signal that the priorities on these islands have changed, I mean the Tiger is now lashing its tail and smashing its way through the harp - the strings of the harp are being lashed by the tail of the tiger," he said.

Heaney said that Tara was unique to him as an Irishman.

"Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks or maybe Stonehenge to an English person or Nara in Japan, which is one of the most famous sites in the world," he said.

"It's a word that conjures an aura - it conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging , a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal, an ideal of the spirit if you like, that belongs in the place and if anywhere in Ireland conjures that up - it's Tara - it's a mythical site of course.

"I mean the traces on Tara are in the grass, are in the earth - they aren't spectacular like temple ruins would be in the Parthenon in Greece but they are about origin, they're about beginning, they're about the mythological, spiritual source - a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit."

Legality

The European Commission is considering legal action against the Irish government which granted itself the powers in 2004 to destroy features or areas of archaeological importance classified as national monuments if in the national interest.

These powers were granted after the government lost a battle in the Irish Supreme Court against archaeological campaigners over the destruction of another monument during the construction of part of the M50 motorway in Dublin.

A national monument at Lismullen close to Tara was discovered last year when an ancient "henge" or ceremonial temple was unearthed in the route of the M3 on 1 April, and then destroyed after its features were recorded.

While experts agreed the henge remnants could not be preserved once exposed, the European Commission is considering legal action over the European legality of Irish law relating to the powers the government has granted itself to destroy national monuments.