- who say the M3 will ruin the Hill of Tara
By - Dr. Mark Dooley.
Celebrity academies generally peddle poisonous
politics. They like to condemn Israel, America and the
West. They detest the Catholic Church, traditional
marriage and nuclear energy. They support gay marriage,
the Shell to Sea campaign and Barack Obama. I say they
are tireless campaigners for crazy causes.
Listen to what our esteemed Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, was quoted as saying in the Irish Times last Saturday. In a documentary made for BBC Radio Ulster, Professor Heaney denounced the controversial M3 motorway currently being built near the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath. The motorway "literally desecrates an area - I mean the word means 'desacralise' and, for centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred ground".
So what does this tell us? It says that Professor Heaney has decided to hop aboard the anti-M3 bandwagon. For that is simply what it is: a bandwagon of pure propaganda pushed by a bunch of tree-sniffing crusties, and backed by the usual band of high-profile do-gooders.
Seamus Heaney should know better. As an academic, he should investigate both sides of an argument and form a reasoned judgment on the basis of incontrovertible evidence. But remember that Professor Heaney is no ordinary academic. He is of the celebrity variety, and for them reasoned judgment can often count for nothing.
Pivotal
That is why you will not hear Seamus Heaney debate the pros and cons of the M3 motorway with the concerned citizens of Tara. What he dishes up instead is high-octane brew of academic-speak, dripping with over-the-top sentimentality. Many might call it profound. I call it silly.
Let me show you what I mean. The pivotal question surrounding the construction of the M3 in Meath is this: will it interfere with the ancient sites at Tara? If you believe it will, then you are expected to say how and why.
But such pedantic exercises are inferior to the towering genius of Seamus Heaney. As I see it, he considers argument worthless, relying instead on messianic pronunciations of the following kind: "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".
Still awake? If so, you will agree that what you have just endured is not a deadly blow against the M3 motorway, but proof positive that Professor Heaney should stick to writing poetry. Look, what we are dealing with here are the rights of the people of Co. Meath to have a better quality of life. They couldn't care less if Seamus Heaney has an intellectual orgasm every time he thinks of Tara. What they care about is spending more time with their children, and less time strapped to a car.
But that doesn't mean they want to see Tara wantonly "desecrated", and why they will rightly react to Heaney's remarks with dismay. They will be especially infuriated by his nonsensical claim that "if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to the whole countryside being ripped up - for the M3 - is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work". If anything illustrates the poet's ignorance of the situation in Tara, that does.
But what can you expect when, on the same Radio Ulster programme, Dr. Jonathan Foyle, British chief executive of the World Monuments Fund, compared the construction of the motorway to "the destruction by Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001 of the Bamiyan Buddhas".
Got that now? The development of the motorway, which doesn't actually touch the Hill of Tara is equivalent to a gang of Muslim fanatics blasting to oblivion an artistic and architectural wonder, simply because it offended their bigotry. And just to prove his point, Dr. Foyle had the World Monuments Fund designate Tara as one of its "endangered sites" in 2007.
Propaganda
Now, I am a committed conservative who has often written here in defence of the Irish countryside. But people like Seamus Heaney and Jonathan Foyle have little interest in balancing the demands of contemporary life with those of conservation. Their aim is to stoke an ideological war based on nothing but propaganda.
And they do so in cynical defiance of thousands of inhabitants in Co. Meath. How else can you explain the following caustic comment by Dr. Foyle - Tara, he says, "is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations, Canterbury for its Christian associations - all rolled into one". Yet it is being destroyed "to shave 20 minutes off a journey time". Well, let's see Dr. Foyle do that journey twice a day, every day, and see how long he can sustain that pompous position.
If you want to know the truth about Tara and the M3 motorway, may I suggest that you ignore the hysterics like Jonathan Foyle, and listen instead to that sober voice of reason, Michael Slavin. Many of you may remember Michael as the voice of show jumping on RTE Radio for over 20 years. He and I did the public commentary at the Dublin Horse Show in the late 1980s, and he was always a consummate professional and performer.
But Michael is also a historian, and a famous resident of Tara. He wrote the best-selling The Book Of Tara, a highly acclaimed text that charts the history of Tara from its legendary origins to the present. He is also the author of The Tara Walk and The Druids At Tara. Put simply, few people know more about Tara than Michael Slavin. And fewer still love it with a passion surpassing his.
Hoax
And yet, this man, who exists only for Tara and everything it symbolizes, founded the Meath Citizens for the M3 Motorway in 2005. That's right, Michael Slavin was sickened by the "incessant barrage of misinformation and propaganda against the proposed relief M3 route". And so he formed the pro-M3 group, and took his cause to the airwaves and to the Oireachtas Committee on Transport, which he addressed in 2005.
Unlike Professor Heaney and Dr. Foyle, Michael does not depend does not depend on either gobbledygook or scaremongering to make his point. No, he and his group went out and carried out surveys which showed 90 per cent of Meath's citizens were in favour of the motorway. They then carefully monitored the traffic conditions in the area, showing that "the provision of the M3 could cut the number of accidents in this area between 30 per cent and 50 per cent".
Moreover, they "did a complete survey of every house in the Tara to Skryne area. In all, 318 families were visited over one weekend, of whom a total of 285 were happy to sign our petition for the M3 on the selected route. They know the area around Tara and Skyrne, that the planned M3 will not go through the Hill of Tara and that our beloved Tara will not be destroyed".
For Michael Slavin and the pro-M3 group, such misinformation tossed a by "archaeologists and academics" is nothing short of "a massive and terrible hoax played on people at home and abroad who revere the Hill of Tara". And that is simply because "the proposed M3 poses no more threat to the Hill of Tara than the River Dodder poses to Leinster House. If there were a real threat to Tara, the most potent and sacred symbol of our royal county, we Meath citizens would be the first to protest against it".
I haven't seen my old friend Micheal Slavin for many moons. But I know his is the authentic voice of Tara. And I also know that his support for the M3 is based on what is best for the sacred Hill and the "hundreds of thousands of citizens and commuters north of Dublin".
Yes, he has the likes of Seamus Heaney and Jonathan Foyle and the European Commission to contend with. But Michael Slavin will continue to fight his cause with conviction and truth. If he wins, justice will be served. But should the celebrities for crazy causes get their way, the sole consequence will be endless misery for the suffering people of Tara.
And who, except academics entirely divorced from reality, can rest easy with that outcome?
© Irish Daily Mail, 3rd. March 2008.
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Yeats/Moore/Hyde Letter to The Times - 1902.