Destruction by documentation.

That is the fate awaiting a newly discovered ancient henge which lies directly in the path of the M3 motorway currently under construction in the Gabhra valley.



It’s simple. First, you document the site. Take photos, samples, measurements, drawings. Then, you wipe it from the face of the earth. This is the trend in Irish archaeology, a field in which a majority of the trained professionals are now funded by private developers and construction companies. In the developer-driven scenario, everything is fair game. It is the builder who has control over whether information about archaeological discoveries can be disseminated to the media while excavation is in progress.

The National Monuments Act would, once upon a time, have guaranteed the protection of sites such as the Lismullen henge from destruction. Not so today. The all powerful minister for roads and monuments (yes, somehow he has control over both) is now vested with the authority to have the ancient sites of the Tara-Skryne valley and elsewhere in Ireland scraped from existence with one stroke of his pen.

The Government was warned, through detailed and expert archaeological opinion from around the globe, that the routing of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne Valley was taking it through one of the most sensitive archaeological landscapes on the planet. They refused to listen, insisting that the motorway would go ahead as planned. And in recent months, that same Government, which is endowed with the charge of protecting our heritage, has forged forward with this nonsense road, desperately trying to advance it beyond the point of no return before an election which might see them ousted.

Who gains by all this? The commuting public of Meath? Hardly. They will, ultimately, come to curse the transport infrastructure in this country when they’re stuck in the enormous tailbacks and bottlenecks caused by motorways feeding into other motorways in Dublin.

Those who will prosper the most from the construction of the M3, apart from the contractors who build it, will be the speculators who own land along its route which will eventually be developed. Who are these people? Do they have any connections with Fianna Fáil, the main Government party? Well, it just so happens that some of them do.

Right now, the Lismullen henge has been gifted a stay of execution. It will survive a little longer. How long that stay of execution will be is a huge mystery right now, in part because it looks like a change of government could be imminent, but also because a change in government will not necessarily improve its chances of survival.

Ultimately, it is obvious that our Government is incapable of protecting our heritage. This “road to gridlock” is a grand symbol of all that is wrong with “modern Ireland”. Our Government wants to build a motorway, which may well become obsolete in 50 years’ time, so that people in Kells and Navan can get to the M50 “car park” in a shorter time, in order that they can carry out their jobs and make money and feed this economy of avariciousness which deems everything to be a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. In this era of great opulence, the destruction of heritage and landscape ultimately makes us all poorer, despite our material wealth. Many of our monuments and our myths have survived for millennia. It is an incredible fact that such an enormous number and type of monuments still stand to tell us the story of our ancestors.

The attitude which suggests that heritage should be sacrificed for “progress” is fundamentally flawed. Do we think ourselves better than those who came before us? When we wilfully destroy the past, we make a fundamental and stark statement, which is this:

The past is irrelevant. It has nothing to teach us. We are better than those who have lived in former times. But, if we deem the past irrelevant, we also deem the present to be irrelevant, because our present is the past of the future.

So, when we plough through the ancient temples and burial grounds of our ancestors, we are announcing and accepting that our own temples and cemeteries are fair game for the developers of the future. Imagine your own local cemetery, where your loved ones are buried, being wiped out of existence a few generations into the future to make way for some ridiculous scheme, the invention of a greedy government, leading a ravenous and apathetic populace.

We live in a democracy.
At least that’s what we’re told.

In a democracy, the ideal of consensus is sacrosanct, even if consensus means “most, but not all”. And there is consensus. According to an Irish Times online poll, 73% of respondents said they wanted the M3 re-routed because of the latest discovery at Lismullen. While the local commuting population of Meath might be in favour of the M3 being built and being built quickly, there is a consensus nationally that its routing is wrong and fundamentally flawed.

Time is running out for this Government. Details of new scandals are emerging. Everything that’s being said and done is being documented by a hungry media, who are reporting to a tired and sickened electorate, fed up of the politics of the cute hoor, the builders’ friends and the quick buck.
Perhaps, ultimately, the Government will face its own destruction by documentation, and, for the sake of all of us, the Lismullen henge and the Tara-Skryne valley will be saved from this ruthless rabble.

We have a choice: destruction by documentation, or conservation by consensus.

Mythical Ireland is a non political website, but naturally we have passionately held opinions about our ancient heritage. If you have an opinion on the above, you are welcome to post your own comment.


Copyright notice: This article may be reproduced, in full, on any website or in any publication, so long as the author, Anthony Murphy, is acknowledged.

I received the following comments on the above article from Tadhg Crowley:

I to a great extent sympathise with many of the sentiments expressed above but I think that some of the views stated about members of the archaeological profession are unfair.

Firstly archaeologists do not choose the routes of roads, or for that matter housing estates. factories or other developments.

Secondly archaeologists do a generally good job at recording monuments before their destruction. A destruction which was alerady decided.

Twenty or thirty years ago we would have know nothing of this presumeably Iron Age ritual enclosure. It would have fallen under the blade of a bulldozer before a single one of it's post-holes or a lone tooth of it's hound had ever revealed their secrets to the Irish people. The archaeological records of the twentieth century are full of accounts of monuments destroyed while archaeologists looked on powerless, by law or any other means, to halt destruction, even for a brief period, to catalogue what remained.

It is a generation of campaigning by under funded, under respected professional archaeologists working for the universities, the state and the private sector who have got us in Ireland to the stage where more of our threatened historic monuments are documented before their destruction than almost anywhere else in the world. That is a success, and a great one!

Yes I think there is too much destruction, and yes, I would like to see a reassessment and rerouting of the motorway but would the people of Ireland please direct their anger in the appropriate, at those starting the fire, not those trying to rescue what they can from the blaze.

Cormac McSparron

Cormac,

Thanks very much for your comments. I just have a couple of observations to make:



Of course. No argument there.



Absolutely, they do a great job. However, archaeologists are in the best position to influence developers over the preservation of sites. Which archaeologist in the employment of a building contractor will say, at risk of losing the contract to another archaeological company, something like, "err, sorry boss, but this archaeological find is unique. You're going to have to build your 10 million euro apartments somewhere else . . ."

Furthermore, the fact that the Lismullen henge did not show up in previous assessment and archaeological surveying of the route is in itself worrying, especially when the archaeology work is costing so much.



I do appreciate that, but today archaeologists are hired to record sites before their destruction. Ultimately, with or without the archaeological digging, the site will be destroyed anyhow.



Again, I broadly agree, but perhaps those who are trying to rescue what they can from the blaze are in a better position than anyone else to educate people on how not to start fires in the first place!!

Once again, thanks a million for your comments. I look forward to a healthy debate on these issues.

http://www.iai.ie/PressReleases/Statement09-05-2007.html