Will Ireland slice up its most mythical site?

international | miscellaneous | other press Tuesday April 26, 2005 10:41 by Colm Toibin

Irish writer Colm Toibin on Tara

As Dick Roche shadows this sacred place with his money-driven sword, Colm Toibin comments in the New York Times.

The house is built now that I have been dreaming about for years. Every week I drive down from Dublin, due south through County Wicklow into County Wexford. I was born and brought up near there.

This journey to the new house where I write belongs to memory. A few spots along that stretch of road have all the resonance and flavor of childhood, but most of the road has changed beyond recognition. The narrow winding road has become mostly motorway - anodyne, anonymous, flavorless. I love it.

I wish I missed the old narrow, familiar road. But I do not. I love the efficiency, the modernity, the coolness of the new road. I love getting to Dublin in an hour and a half rather than two hours. I love driving freely in the outside lane, rather than being stuck forever behind a tractor or a cattle truck.

Nonetheless, when, a number of years ago, they were widening the road that runs through a nature reserve called the Glen of the Downs, I supported the protesters, mainly young people who moved there and lived in the trees. I spoke in a television debate in their favor, pointing out that Irish governments since independence have seldom been willing to put our precious heritage before crude, quick development. They would, if the opportunity arose, run a motorway through the Hill of Tara, the most important ancient Irish site.

Until recently, this idea might be useful in a heated debate as a worst case, impossible to contemplate, on a par with selling your granny. But this now is the prospect we face in Ireland. Despite protests from many distinguished archaeologists and historians, it seems likely that in the next few weeks, the government will announce that it is going ahead with plans to build a four-lane highway and a busy interchange close to the Hill of Tara.

Tara, an hour's drive northwest of Dublin, was the seat of kings and remains the site of legends. It was, from prehistoric times, given a special status. St. Patrick confronted the pagan kings and druids there in the fifth century. It was the center of the universe in many ancient Irish sagas, the pinnacle of power.

In the 19th century, as Irish nationalism looked to a past unsullied by the Danish or Norman or English invasions, it became a symbol of Ireland's former strength and glory.

Emigrants from Ireland, like the O'Hara family in "Gone With the Wind," could conjure up the old country by naming their estate after its most sacred place. Indeed, so sacred became its reputation at the end of the 19th century, and so much mystery surrounded what was buried beneath, that a sect called the British Israelites began to dig there in search for the Ark of the Covenant. They were greeted with indignation by Irish nationalists like Yeats, who believed that the Hill of Tara, where the remains of 30 or so prehistoric monuments are somewhat visible to this day, must have its mystery unraveled by the slow and painstaking work of archaeologists.

I drove there on a Sunday afternoon under a low and threatening Irish sky. It is not a set of ruined castles and broken stones. Its grandeur lies in its commanding position and from hints and clues, like large mounds, some circles and earthworks, that help us imagine what this must have looked like when it was a set of great ceremonial buildings and sites. And its grandeur lies underneath the ground, where for centuries to come archaeologists will find not only treasure but also significant evidence about early Ireland.

The proposed road will not cut through the actual hill, but it will run close, slicing through a landscape that was once integrated with Tara. The route of the road includes many important archaeological sites that will have to be excavated thoroughly before the road builders destroy them.

The National Roads Authority has built up significant expertise in doing these rescue missions according to best possible practice. The interchange and the new road, however, will bring in their wake not only traffic, but development like warehouses and light industry. A rural idyll becomes an urban landscape.

The beauty and isolation of the valley, which has Tara on one side and Skryne, another historical site of some importance, on the other, will effectively be destroyed. A place of myth and mystery will look like anywhere. It is called modernization.

For commuters who drive each day to work in Dublin from towns and villages in County Meath, where Tara lies, it might cut 20 minutes off the journey. It will make them happy as the road to Wexford makes me happy. But it seems almost beyond belief that Ireland, awash with new money and enormous economic confidence, cannot find another route for the road and leave for generations to come a heritage that has been left to us.

On one side of the argument there is a fierce pragmatism about the need to bring Irish infrastructure into the 21st century. On the other side there is a mixture of well-informed indignation and a lovely old dreaminess.

When I asked one of the opponents of the new road why he minded the idea of powerful lights on it and the interchange, he replied, as though the answer were obvious, "On a clear night Tara must be able to see the stars."

(From The New York Times)