Madam, - For obvious reasons attention is now focused on the discovery of a "henge" at Lismullen, directly in the path of the M3. Important though it is, this find should not be allowed eclipse the dozens of sites already revealed along this part of the road corridor, many of which are also of singular importance. Unfortunately for them they were not declared to be national monuments. The reason why is quite incredible. It appears that responsibility for judging them to be national monuments (or not, as the case may be) was left entirely up the National Roads Authority's archaeologists themselves.
It is not surprising that they concluded that none of the 40 or so sites in question merited this distinction; a conclusion accepted at face value by Dick Roche's officials in the Department of Heritage. The NRA advised the department that none of the sites could be considered to be of historical or cultural value, and that most of them were of only moderate archaeological interest. So, the admission by the Roads Authority that they have now chanced upon a site of national monument calibre should not be construed as a measure of their bona fides which, I am afraid, are already well and truly compromised.
Let us hope that the assessment of the significance of this new monument amounts to more that just a questionable exercise, and that we are not subjected to the Roads Authority playing down yet again the importance of what they have found.
I suppose it would be too much to hope that we might also be spared the ignorant pronouncements of a former minister for heritage who seems to have concluded that what has been discovered at Lismullen is a ringfort and some old posts! - Yours, etc
CONOR NEWMAN, Department of Archaeology, NUI Galway.
Madam, - In the classic novel Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, Scarlett O'Hara at one point wonders: "Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?".
Perhaps future generations in Ireland will be asking "Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the road-laying machines which had swept through the Tara-Skryne valley?" - Yours, etc,
NIALL O'DONOGHUE, Vesilahti, Finland.