Can a booklet save our heritage?

ACCORDING to an advertisement in the Meath papers recently, the National Roads Authority (NRA) will shortly be delivering an information booklet on the M3 motorway to 20,000 homes in the county.

The booklet, entitled 'The NRA, the M3 and Archaeology The Facts', will, according to the advertisement, answer all our questions about the proposed 64km tolled motorway and its impact on the archaeological heritage.

If this document does all that it promises, it must be seen as a welcome development, a constructive step in a highly fraught and at times confusing debate where expert opinion and interpretation are clearly divided, where hard facts have often been in short supply and where significant findings have been either totally ignored or buried in a mass of technical data and ambiguous verbal padding.