Threats to Tara

Past: 

At the turn of the century the Jewish Israelites dug trenches through Rath of the Synods and the entrance to the banqueting hall in search of the Ark of the Covenant.

They guarded their digs with guns and were none too friendly to those that opposed them. Most of the national reaction was, as it is today, indifference. 

Maud Gonne then saw in a vision the sovereignty of Tara weeping and wrote about her vision in the national newspapers. This did turn the tide of public opinion and the unruly excavators were turned out. Yeats, too, played a role in all of this. 

Ironically, in the last few years a man claiming that God had shown him in a dream where the ark was buried on the hill, applied for an excavation license to excavate a 4m x 4m trench. But the authorities denied him his chance to be proved wrong. 

Present: 

Crazy as it may sound, the authorities granted planning for a four-lane, tolled motorway through the same Tara landscape. 

The motorway is probably a mere 30m wide at its widest, but its path takes it careening into ring ditches, fulachts, hengiform national monuments, early Christian souterrains, medieval farm enclosures, post-modern schools and post offices, and transition Bronze Age burials. 

Think then how rich the landscape is if this is what a 30m vignette is showing us. 

Somewhere in the region of 80 per cent of the people in Ireland do not want the motorway through this sacred landscape. If we lived in a democracy, this motorway would not be going ahead. It is not in our national interest or the common good. 

Directors on the board of the National Roads Authority (the unelected authority ramming it through this sacred valley) are in no way qualified to make this decision on our behalf. One of them even sells land in the motorway corridor. If that's not a vested interest, then what is? But because I live in a democracy, I am assured that these people are beyond reproach.  

I beg to differ. 

A famous poet once said, “The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and then walks grinning at the funeral”. 

I think this well portrays the situation we are now entering into. 

Future: 

I still maintain that it's not too late to re-route just a fraction of the motorway around the valley and avoid this suicide blow to the collective conscious of the psyche of Ireland.  

But it's expensive; it's never been done before! 

Well, let's be brave and break the mould. What's a few million extra when the government coffers are awash with spare cash? My guess is that had the shorter route outside the valley been taken then the road would have started last year. 

What can people do? 

They can protest, sit in front of diggers, chain themselves to trees. The men and women of 1916 did more than this; they sacrificed their comforts, homes and very lives, so obviously it was worth something then. Maybe now our values have changed. 

At the very least people could still write a letter to minister Gormley, the EU Commission, the taoiseach or a local elected representative. 

In years to come when the motorway has been re-routed, people could look back with a sense of pride and think, ”I had something to do with that, I made a difference, I put in my tupence worth, I saved Tara”. 

Save Tara.