Gardaí prevent final attempt at protest

THE OPENING of the M3 motorway yesterday was a day that protesters had hoped would never come.

They were denied a last attempt to vent their fury by a Garda presence which ensured that the opening ceremony was only a speck in the distance.

Some did not even get as far as the Athboy interchange overpass, which is where most of the protesters gathered.

“The gardaí tried to arrest us a few times and said you can’t walk on the new road, you can’t park on the road,” said Dan Maloney who assembled with a small number of protesters near the Navan slip-road to the new motorway.

Archaeologist Emma Dowling said she would rather the motorway had not been built. “I feel quite sad and disappointed and upset, but I’m hopeful that we can get a preservation order on the [Tara/Skryne] valley so that a future Government would revise the decision and try and do something else.”

The campaigners who wanted the motorway rerouted away from the Hill of Tara fought a high-profile campaign in the courts and in the media. They elicited the support of Nobel Prize-winning poet Séamus Heaney, actors Stuart Townsend, Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and the artist Louis Le Brocquy among many others, but were not able to persuade the Government to reroute the motorway.

Novelist Colm Tóibín said in Listowel, where he is the chairman of Writer’s Week, that the motorway routing was “shameful, short-sighted and beyond belief . . . It is sad to see those who have misruled our country ganging up on our heritage.”