Irish Times

[S.I. Sheehan]

Tara: Re-routing the debate



It has become a touchstone for our guilt in eagerly seeking development
while, at times, forsaking heritage. But the M3 controversy is only a
symptom of much deeper-rooted issues. Three experts in the field offer
their perspectives on how the debate should start to move on from the
current entrenched positions



What defines the Tara landscape?



Gabriel Cooney



John Gormley TD, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local
Government, has stated that, having reviewed the matter, and despite his
own clear opposition, he does not have the power to re-route the M3
motorway near the Hill of Tara. So where do we go from here? In relation
to the extensive archaeological work carried out on the route by the
National Roads Authority, the key objective must be getting the maximum
information return.



Knowledge and interpretation of the past is the underlying premise of
archaeology. All the sites and features were excavated to best
professional practice. Despite this, in the heat of the debate there has
been considerable coverage about "destruction" of sites. It would appear
that in large part this is due to the use of the phrase "archaeological
excavation is destruction", a term that personally I am unhappy with.



It is worth remembering that the vast majority of sites along the route
are known only as a result of archaeological survey and testing. We need
to stop thinking of excavation as destruction and see it instead as the
creation of knowledge.



In relation to the Tara landscape, a key issue is minimising the impact
of the motorway. There are established approaches to dampening noise and
light impact and "greening" the motorway to make it less visible. The
character of the area must not be spoiled by inappropriate development
that could follow on motorway construction.



In this context the announcement by the Minister that he is considering
designating the area as a Landscape Conservation Area (LCA) is welcome
and builds on a commitment in the Meath Development Plan. Definition of
an LCA will bring us to the issue at the heart of the Tara debate.



This debate has focused on different perceptions and definitions of the
Tara landscape: legal, popular and research-driven. Photographs of the
Hill of Tara dominate coverage of the impact of the M3. The impression
has frequently been created that the motorway is going through the hill.
In fact, it runs 2km to the east in the Tara-Skryne valley. On the other
hand, it has come to be recognised that the Hill of Tara forms the core
of a wider archaeological landscape.



What is at issue is the extent, form and constitution of that landscape.
Do we have an agreed definition of what area constitutes the Tara
landscape? Defining the boundaries of historic, archaeological or
cultural landscapes so they can be designated, managed or protected are
difficult issues. But they need to be tackled.



There are other instances where landscapes are being impacted on by
large-scale development.



One example is the proposed deep sea port at Bremore, Co Dublin, the
location of a passage tomb cemetery and other archaeological features.
As the European Landscape Convention recognises, alongside the
definition of special landscapes, there has to be regard for the
landscape as a whole.



On what basis do we make choices about the future character and
appearance of the landscape? There is a commitment in the Programme for
Government to introduce a National Landscape Strategy. Defining special
landscapes and sustaining the character of the broader landscape will be
central to such a strategy.



The motorway does not spell the end



of the Tara landscape. With time the M3 will come to be regarded as a
contested, major intervention in a landscape that has been formed by
human action over millennia.



The questions facing us now are how we can learn from this to better
inform the decisions and choices we make about this and other landscapes
in the future.



Prof Gabriel Cooney, of the UCD School of Archaeology, is a Heritage
Council member and is on the committee advising the Minister of the
Environment on the excavation of the national monument at Lismullin, Co
MeathRomantic notions simplify the debate



Ian Russell



The Tara controversy has shown that people in Ireland and throughout the
world care deeply about the shared heritage and landscapes of Ireland.
It has also shown that, at times, this care and sentiment can regress to
fundamentalist perspectives that dictate what heritage is or what a
landscape is, rather than participate in their continuing negotiation.



George Petrie, in his 1839 survey of the hill, noted that Tara was
'undistinguished either for altitude or picturesqueness of form'. This
insight suggests that Tara's significance is not in its static,
restricted or romantic visual form but in its narratives and
relationships with the wider landscape. As a landscape, Tara both
inspires and confuses us. It has been declared, by some, to have
universal and 'obvious' qualities, but from a more dispassionate
perspective, there is nothing either obvious or universal about such
claims. They derive from nuanced mixtures of sentiments, agencies and
ideologies.



Landscapes are complex and capricious. As active human agents in
changing landscapes we do ourselves a disservice by allowing a
simplistic, romantic aura to be cast over our relationships to places.
The idealistic gaze which dominates descriptions of places such as Tara
obfuscates the dynamic qualities of our shifting engagements with such
places, framing the debate in monolithic, culturally-specific terms.



As the composition of the people who live on the island of Ireland
changes, our goal, in respect of the stewardship of heritage, must
become the promotion of dynamic, open negotiation of how that heritage
is constituted.



Archaeologists who have participated in this negotiation by engaging
with development have been described by some as entering a Faustian
bargain, of making an illicit pact with the destroyers of heritage. It
is true that archaeologists and developers work together. This is
nothing new and is, indeed, a professional obligation.



What is new, however, is the appropriation of archaeological sites to
oppose road construction by using them to create reductive and
fundamentalist frames for debates over heritage and landscapes. It could
be suggested that the Faustian bargain presented to us today is to make
a pact with regressive cultural politics, giving over heritage and the
negotiation of landscapes to an exclusive, monolithic view of how best
to manifest, narrate and perform the past in the present.



Ireland has undergone immense changes over a short time. People in
Ireland have had to make difficult choices between a myriad of competing
values and infrastructural and developmental concerns, under intense
pressure both from within and from the international community. Many
other developed states in the world underwent similar periods of change,
but what is unique in Ireland is that this has occurred in tandem with
increasing social concern for the preservation of heritage and a
dramatic "boom" in the archaeological and heritage sectors. The tensions
between development needs and the desire to preserve and safeguard
heritage and traditional ways of life present us with difficult choices.
These are the growing pangs of development.



Difficult choices will still need to be made, and no single solution
will heal the wounds or alleviate the guilt some may have for the paths
that are finally chosen. We can, however, participate in the negotiation
of these choices, exploring the roots of our values and working to build
consensus through compromise. If there are any things worth preserving
for future generations they are the readiness to engage in open debate
and the will to work towards mature compromises over competing values.



Dr Ian Russell is the NEH Keough Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute
for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in the
USWill our descendants thank us or curse us?



Pat Cooke



In about 50 years or so, an Irish historian will be faced with an
interesting challenge: to explain to a contemporary audience how a
putatively post-Christian, secularised Ireland of the early 21st century
could have become so fixated on the idea that part of its territory -
the Tara-Skryne Valley - was a "sacred landscape".



One of the ironies of heritage is that when thinking about it people
tend to lose any historical sense of the thing itself; we behave as if
the values we profess about it are good for all time; as if all
generations cared, or will care, as much about "our" heritage as we do.



What posterity has bequeathed us is substantially that which has
survived as much by accident as design. But what characterises our age
is that it is an "age of heritage": never before in history have so many
been preoccupied with saving so much for future generations. Whether our
inheritors thank us or curse us for the burden remains to be seen.



For the moment, we seem to be working off the vainglorious assumption
that our value judgements about the vast amounts of heritage that should
be protected will prove timeless.



Some of those defending Tara have described it as an Irish Acropolis,
but it might be more accurate to think of it as Thermopylae. If the pass
is not defended, the Barbarian hordes will rush through, spiritual
values will be trampled and a rash of untrammelled development will
plague the land. That Tara is required to bear this symbolic weight
explains some of the extraordinary heat the cause has generated.



Unprecedented economic expansion has coincided with a process of rapid
secularisation in Ireland. Tara is synonymous with a world of seemingly
lost faith in priceless things. We want to consecrate Tara by throwing a
mantle of conservation across much of it. But even if we do that, we
will have treated only the symptom, not the cause.



The pains of development are universal across Ireland; there are still a
thousand other Taras to be fought over with equal passion. But will
they? A few miles away, the building of a hotel in the very lee of Trim
Castle caused no more than a flutter of outrage. This may be the more
typical case.



The impassioned defence of the Tara-Skryne valley as both a coherent
landscape and a sacred one is presented as a rhetorically self-evident
proposition. But there is nothing at all self-evident about either of
these deeply value-laden words; both "landscape" and "sacred" are terms
that serve to mystify rather than clarify what is actually there. In
this sense, they are contestable as purely cultural propositions. We
can, and should be, arguing about this.



The overwhelming rhetoric of sacredness and spirituality demands the
elision of the costs involved in prioritising the value of one thing
(heritage) over another (infrastructure). It helps to reify landscape as
relic, placing an overriding value on conservation - the preserved scene
- over the knowledge that might be extracted through excavation.



This readily translates into a kind of aesthetic bullying that treats
those who are not of the faith as Philistines or Infidels. The deep
attraction of asserting landscape as an apriori value is that it
facilitates the avoidance of difficult questions of choice and
prioritisation by casting a sacred spell over the lot.



It manifestly refuses to recognise terrain as a palimpsest, ceaselessly
scratched over with the graffiti of dead generations, and subject to the
interventions and exigencies of the contemporary moment.



For as long as we treat Tara as a cause rather than a symptom of much
wider or deeper anxieties, the argument over it will be riven by
polarised passions. It will be interesting to see what that future
historian will make of it all.



Pat Cooke is director of the MA in cultural policy and arts management
in the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy