St Patrick and Tara

national | miscellaneous | press release Wednesday March 15, 2006 00:57 by M. Ni Bhrolchain - www.savetara.com

Irish Government selling Ireland abroad

As most of the Government leaves Ireland to sell the Emerald Isle to countries abroad will they also tell those countries they are visiting that the island will soon be covered in concrete, apartments and motorways? That the Green and Emerald Isle is quickly becoming the Concrete Isle?

As the ministers wine and dine abroad in countries including France, America, Australia, England and Japan; will they explain to the confused future tourist why they are planning a motorway within a kilometre of the Hill of Tara, through the Gabhra Valley where St Patrick himself confronted druids and pagans on his arrival in Ireland in the mid-fifth century.

How will Minister Dick Roche explain to the Japanese in Tokoyo, who visit Ireland’s heritage sites in their thousands every year, that he has ratified a motorway through Tara’s landscape? Tara is the site of the most famous confrontation between pagan and Christian in Ireland.

Patrick’s biographer says that he lit his Pascal Fire on the Hill of Slane, just as the pagan fire was to be lit on Tara. The druids at Tara warn the king, Loegaire son of Niall of the Nine Hostages, that unless they put out the fire it will outlive their pagan fire forever. Loegaire is feasting in the banqueting hall when Patrick enters and confronts the ‘great, fierce, pagan emperor of the barbarians reigning in Tara, which was the capital of the Irish’.

Loegaire is eventually converted to Christianity but this is not the case in another version of this scene where he refuses baptism and insists on being buried in pagan fashion – that is upright and fully armed in the ramparts of Tara facing his hereditary enemy, the king of Leinster.

In another account a druid falls dramatically from the sky at the hands of Patrick. He lands on the ground frozen with hailstones and snow and the monument is still there on Tara known as the Druid’s Stone.

This is the landscape targeted by the proposed M3. The Irish diaspora abroad have an opportunity over the next week to impress upon the Irish Government that this decision affects all of them and that Tara belongs to Irish people all over the world.

Dr. Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin said: “Over 350 academics world wide have expressed their horror at this proposal. We ask that everyone who cares about heritage in Ireland take this chance to express their horror with letters to their newspapers and at St Patrick’s Day celebrations taking place in their area or in person if they have the luck to meet one of these politicians.”