In Ireland, Commuters vs. Kings

national | environment | other press Saturday January 22, 2005 20:56 by Michael Hennigan - Finfacts.com

Road Plan Clashes With Protection of Ancient Tara

This is an article from today's Washington Post.

It is presented in full here, as the site requires registration.

TARA, Ireland -- Her name was Tea, and one Celtic legend says an ancient Irish king named Erimhon fell madly in love with her in Spain and enticed her back to his native land. As a wedding present, he gave her the most beautiful hill in all of Ireland and named it after her.

The Hill of Tara, as it is known today, rises gently from some of Europe's richest pastures, an emerald vista dotted with a network of man-made burial mounds, earthworks and monumental stones. For people who lived here beginning 6,000 years ago, this was the most sacred place on Earth, the site of coronations, festivals and myths, and the entry point to the netherworld where the dead dwell for eternity.

These days the Hill of Tara is not only one of Ireland's most legendary sites but the focus of one of its most bitter controversies. The country's road planners, seeking to ease traffic congestion in the booming exurbs of the capital, Dublin, 25 miles away, are preparing a four-lane highway through the picturesque Skryne Valley that lies just east of the hill.

Most local residents, frazzled by two-hour commutes down the narrow, two-lane rural turnpike that is their only direct route to Dublin, passionately favor the highway. But a determined band of opponents, spearheaded by archaeologists, environmentalists and preservationists, is fighting it every step of the way, threatening legal action that could hang up the project for a decade or kill it altogether.

This is very much a tale of modern Ireland and its new prosperity. Over the past decade, an economically stagnant isle has been transformed into the Celtic Tiger, with double-digit annual growth fueled by a high-tech boom and generous subsidies from the European Union.

Ireland's population, depleted for more than a century by emigration, famine and poverty, has now surpassed 4 million -- its highest level in more than 130 years. New housing is mushrooming across the countryside and road traffic has nearly doubled in the past 10 years.

One of the leaders of the Save Tara Skryne Valley Group is Vincent Salafia, 39, who left southern Ireland in 1983, as did perhaps half his high school graduating class. He went to college and law school in Florida and returned home seven years ago when the boom and a sense of homesickness proved irresistible. Salafia says he's keenly aware that he's fighting the impact of the same prosperity that drew him back to Ireland.

"It struck me things were changing very rapidly and that the Ireland I knew was disappearing," he says. "It's beginning to look more and more like Florida: a big building boom and no one paying attention to environmental or heritage issues."

The battle for Tara began in earnest two years ago after the National Roads Authority proposed the M3 motorway. The 70-mile road is designed to ease congestion heading from Dublin to County Meath, a blend of old farms and new housing tracts much like Virginia's Loudoun County of three decades ago. Meath's population has more than doubled over the past decade and is projected to double again during the next. Parts of the N3, the sole existing two-lane road to Dublin, carry two to three times the traffic it was designed for, and the accident rate is 50 percent higher than the national average.

On a typical evening, traffic heading northwest from Dublin slows to a crawl from the interchange with the M50 all the way to the burgeoning town of Navan 20 miles away. Tommy Reilly, a local politician who runs a newspaper shop in Navan, says that when he opens at 6 a.m., the main road, which goes through the middle of each town, is already choked with traffic and fumes of commuters heading south.

The national road planners looked at 10 different routes for a new motorway and settled on the one they contend would cause the least amount of damage -- including not only archaeological issues but impact on air and water quality and the number of houses and trees that would have to be removed. The state planning board held 28 days of public hearings and confirmed the choice.

There are 120,000 known archaeological monuments in Ireland and hundreds of thousands more beneath the surface; road planners argue that it's almost impossible to stick a spade in the ground without hitting something of value. Excavators marking out the roadway have already uncovered 38 archaeological finds.

Those deemed valuable will be recorded and packed off to the national museum in Dublin. "We have to live in the real world," says Michael Egan, spokesman for the National Roads Authority. "There's no perfect alternative but we've done our best to balance the issues."

The heart of the conflict is over the size and meaning of the Hill of Tara. Proponents of the motorway insist the hill should be seen solely as the oval promontory of a few hundred acres currently under state protection. By that reckoning, the new motorway would be at least a mile away -- in most places, farther than the current N3.

But opponents contend that a realistic definition of the hill must include the adjoining valley and nearby Hill of Skryne, all of which formed a coherent civilization from the Iron Age and are honeycombed with dozens of invaluable archaeological sites and a rich, if largely buried, history.

"There are monuments and sites throughout the area that define the core zone of the Hill of Tara and the royal domain around it, and the motorway is literally going right through the middle of it," says Conor Newman, an archaeologist at the National University of Ireland at Galway, who has studied the region for 13 years.

On a clear day much of Ireland's heartland is visible from Tara's crest. Its features include the Mound of Hostages, which is aligned to the rising sun and full moon, and dates to 2500 B.C., and the ancient coronation stone known as the Lia Fail, scene of the inauguration of the 142 kings said to have reigned here. St. Patrick, Ireland's patron saint, journeyed to Tara in A.D. 433 to challenge the power of the wizards.

In more recent times, 400 Irish patriots died in a battle with British soldiers atop the hill, and author Margaret Mitchell took the name for Scarlett O'Hara's plantation in "Gone With the Wind."

Opponents have gathered support from dozens of archaeologists and historians throughout Ireland and the world, including the Archaeological Institute of America and the European Association of Archaeologists. Many local residents resent this invasion by outsiders, known derisively as "blow-ins."

Michael Cassidy, president of the Navan Chamber of Commerce, says the lack of adequate roads means the area cannot attract new businesses that would bring jobs and save many residents from heading south to Dublin every morning. He resents campaigners who have moved to the area simply to oppose the road. "These people are going on the national airwaves claiming to be residents and it's not true," he says.

Michael Slavin, a local historian who has written about the hill and leads a group called Friends of Tara, says that 90 percent of the residents of County Meath support the project, but that opponents have mobilized the news media and international opposition through distorted arguments and use of the Internet. "To say the motorway is going through the Hill of Tara is like saying the Washington Monument could be destroyed by a highway built two miles away," he says.

The next decision is in the hands of Dick Roche, the environment minister, who has to decide whether to give the excavators permission to dig up and move archaeological finds. No matter what he decides, both sides expect the matter to wind up in court.

"We realize we can't freeze-frame the whole country," says archaeologist Newman. "But the Hill of Tara has exceptional importance and status conferred upon us by our ancestors from pre-history."