Why drive through a national treasure?

I WISH to express my outrage at the Government’s plans to route the M3 through the Tara/Skryne valley. Photographs of the excavation site make it clear that the process is being carried out in a destructive and careless manner.

Why would the Government choose to build a motorway through what has been a culturally significant landscape since the neolithic period, and thus destroy one of the country’s richest cultural treasures?

To do so means inflicting the same kind of damage here as British governments have done to Stonehenge and the archaeologically rich area surrounding it.

Such a decision can only be viewed by the rest of the world as one of staggering stupidity. Would the Italian government build a highway straight through the Coliseum? I think not.

As a Canadian scholar of medieval Irish literature and history, I appeal to the Government to reverse the decision to route the M3 through the Tara/Skryne valley immediately. Tara/Skryne should be designated a world heritage site.

Joanne Findon

Assistant Professor

Department of English Literature

Trent University

Peterborough

Ontario

Canada