Tara and the M3

The plan to run a motorway past the Hill of Tara is surely an act of "cultural vandalism", as Mr Emmet Stagg suggested in the…

The plan to run a motorway past the Hill of Tara is surely an act of "cultural vandalism", as Mr Emmet Stagg suggested in the Dáil on Wednesday. It is not adequate for the National Roads Authority to say the chosen route would avoid the "core zone" around Tara.

What is at stake is not the mystical hill itself, where Ireland's high kings were crowned from time immemorial, but an archaeological landscape with Tara as its centrepiece.

Nor is it sufficient for the NRA to rely on the fact that An Bord Pleanála approved the €800 million plan after concluding it would "not have a significant impact" on Tara, because this was also based on a narrow definition of the surrounding landscape. In addition, it should be noted that the appeals board has approved all 14 of the major road schemes on which it was called upon to adjudicate since January 2003, mostly without making any modifications.

The board, whose annual report was published on Thursday, has been rubber-stamping the Government's roads programme, even in cases where it had serious reservations - such as the proposed M7/M8 interchange in Co Laois. It is not, of course, a matter for An Bord Pleanála to decide on the merits of the motorway programme in its totality; that is a matter for the Coalition Government. Even at this late stage, Ministers need to ask themselves the fundamental question - will feeding all of the motorways into the M50, like the spokes of a wheel, really contribute to more balanced regional development, or will it simply confirm the dominance of Dublin? And at what cost? More than €20 billion, according to the most recent estimates.

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Might there not be more economical solutions? Such as the proposal in today's Weekend Review (italics) for a link road between the outskirts of Navan to the Drogheda bypass, so that traffic on the existing N3 and N2 routes would have the option of travelling to Dublin on the hugely expensive (over €800 million) but underused M1 motorway? Lateral thinking would go a long way to relieve the congestion being experienced on these routes.

Even if all 42 of the sites that lie in the path of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne valley are "archaeologically resolved" before being rolled over, such a costly exercise would not in itself mitigate the basic problem - that a motorway, arguably not required, will desecrate the landscape around Tara. The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dick Roche, needs to consider this wider context in deciding whether to authorise an archaeological excavation programme to facilitate this extremely misguided plan.