Will the graves of the Fianna be covered with builders’ rubble?

A PLANNING application has been submitted to Meath County Council for a construction and demolition waste recycling plant to be built at the base of the Hill of Tara.

The location of the proposed plant is at Philpotstown crossroads, commonly known as Garlow Cross.

In his submission, the planning applicant refers to the small River Gabhra close to the proposed development not by its name, but as a ‘drain’.

Surely the applicant must know that in Irish mythology the area of the proposed development was the scene of the Battle of Gabhra in the third century AD.

In that battle, caused by the resentment of the High King of Tara towards Finn and the Fianna, the Fianna, outnumbered by 20-to-one, were defeated and their power broken.

The legend concludes that many of the Fianna “were left dead in Gabhra, and graves were made for them, and the whole length of the Rath of Gabhra from end to end, it is that was the grave of Oscar, son of Oisin, son of Finn”.

When I read the planning applicant’s unworthy reference to the River Gabhra, I was reminded of another small river in northern Italy called the Rubicon.

As is well known, Julius Caesar crossed it in the first century BC in defiance of Pompey and the Roman senate, and so gave us the phrase “crossing the Rubicon”.

It is said that as Caesar crossed the river he uttered ‘the die is cast’, and so began a civil war.

Have we crossed the Rubicon in permitting the planned M3 motorway through the Tara-Skryne valley and across the Gabhra battlefield site?

Will the die be cast for the internationally important Hill of Tara and its setting if this development is permitted?

Will this be the first of many developments around the nearby preposterous Blundelstown interchange?

Will Environment Minister Dick Roche, who promised protection against development in the area, take decisive action to prevent this first assault and so preserve the integrity of the area, or what little is left of it, if and when the motorway is constructed?

Does anybody in authority care?

Let me conclude by quoting from WB Yeats in his preface to Lady Gregory’s Irish Mythology: “This land where your fathers lived proudly and finely should be dear and dear and again dear”.

Tommy Hamill

Ballinter

Navan

Co Meath