Heaney claims motorway near
Tara
- desecrates sacred landscape
By - Frank McDonald, Environment
Editor.
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's Taliban
regime in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
In his interview with BBC reporter Diarmaid Fleming,
Prof. Heaney said the motorway "literally desecrates an
area - I mean the word means to desacralise' and, for
centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have
been regarded as part of the sacred ground".
Referring to the 1916 Proclamation having summoned the
Irish people "in the name of the dead generations", he
said: "If ever there was a place that deserved to be
preserved in the name of the dead generations from
pre-historic times . . . it was Tara".
Prof. Heaney added: "I 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.
"The traces on Tara are in the grass, in the earth. They
aren't spectacular like temple ruins in Greece but they
are about origin, they're about beginning, they're about
the mythological, spiritual source - something that gives
the country its distinctive spirit".
He recalled that WB Yeats, George Moore and Arthur
Griffith had written a letter to The Irish Times
complaining that the British Israelites, who thought the
Ark of the Covenant was buried at Tara, were desecrating
a "consecrated landscape" by digging there.
"So, I thought to myself, if a few holes in the ground
made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's
happening to that whole countryside being ripped up [for
the M3] is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work",
Prof. Heaney said.
According to Dr. Foyle, the entire Tara complex "is the
equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal
associations and Canterbury for its Christian
associations all rolled into one" yet it was being
destroyed "to shave 20 minutes off a journey time".
© The Irish Times, 1st. March 2008.
Related Articles:
Yeats/Moore/Hyde Letter to The Times - 1902.
