Irish Mail on Sunday - Sunday, 2 January 2009
TAX-PAYERS face paying hundreds of millions of Euros if a series of new challenges against the M3 motorway succeed, campaigners warned last night. Lawyers representing anti-M3 protesters trying to save the Hill of Tara from the motorway have lodged a complaint with the United Nations against the Irish government. This has been lodged with the UN’s Commission on Human Rights on the grounds that construction of the motorway through such an historic site breaches both the Irish people’s right to enjoy their culture and live in a healthy environment. Such tactic has proved successful in the past, for example in 1980s in cases taken against the Australian government over inappropriate development of sacred cultural sites.
The UN approach is being backed by writer Seamus Heaney and artists Jim Fitzpatrick and Louis Le Brocquy, who have both donated paintings to be auctioned off to raise funds.
TaraWatch lawyers are also to challenge M3 contractor Ferrovial’s involvement in the UN Global Compact (UGC) - the ethical practices charter the company signed up to in early 2000. A similar challenge took place in 2007, when a Ferrovial motorway-building project through an EU Special Protection Area was halted after an EU Court of Justice challenge. The Spanish-based construction company is one of 5,000 firms and organizations from over 130 countries worldwide who have committed themselves to ten UGC principles. These cover good corporate practice, human rights, the environment and anti-corruption. Ferrovial has described its commitment to the UGC principles as being ‘one of the pillars of its corporate responsibility policy.’
All of the challenges under way by TaraWatch’s legal team - which includes legal experts from Trinity College Dublin and the Human Rights Centre at NUI Galway - have previously proved successful in legal challenges to the development of other historic sites around the world. They are the latest in a series of moves by protesters against the controversial €800m motorway that cuts through the Hill of Tara, which runs between Navan and Dunshaughlin, in Co Meath. Last March one of the protests saw Lisa ‘Squeak’ Feeney chain herself to an underground tunnel in a bid to stop work on a section of the M3 at Rath Lugh. Other celebrities to lend their opposition have included actor Stuart Townsend and his wife Charlize Theron, and Tudors star Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
TaraWatch Lawyer Vincent Salafia said last night: ‘This new series of legal challenges stand a very realistic chance of success, especially as this approach has worked elsewhere before. ‘It’s not too late for the government to get the M3 re-routed, and at a relatively low extra cost. ‘But if it perseveres, and Tara gets World Heritage Status, it’s tax payers who are going to end up having to cover the extra costs involved in a future re-routing. ‘In the UK, the estimated cost of re-routing a road at Stonehenge hit more than €500m.’
Another strand of TaraWatch’s bid to save the Hill of Tara is to get it listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They are urging everybody to write to the Environment Minister Gormley and to ask that Tara be listed. Salafia said last night: ‘The Hill of Tara complex qualifies for World Heritage status as a natural and cultural landscape of outstanding universal value, due to its unique cultural significance, and the extent of the surviving remains. ‘Tara covers a much larger area than that the 100 acres of State-owned land on the summit of the Hill, and the M3 passes through the middle of the area to be protected.’
If the Hill of Tara is listed, then the M3 could have to be re-routed around the site – something that the UK government has had to spend millions trying to achieve. It is currently facing censured by UNESCO for its failure to relieve traffic congestion at the site. The UN’s cultural body warned the UK government it would have to sort the problem – caused by holiday traffic – when it awarded Stonehenge World Heritage Status in 1986. A road passes just 150 yards from the stones and plans to solve congestion with a dual carriageway in a tunnel were recently scrapped by the UK government because of the estimated €500m cost. However, the government’s failure to comply with UNESCO’s warnings more than 22 years ago have already cost of €30m in failed road development surveys and it faces having Stonehenge taken off the list of World Heritage Sites, which will cost the country in terms of prestige and tourism revenue.
The Irish government faces a similar problem if the Hill of Tara – which is on the World Monuments Fund’s latest List of 100 Most Endangered Sites - gets World Heritage Status. Ireland signed up to the World Heritage Convention in 1991, and in doing so, committed itself to protecting and conserving national and international world heritage sites. It also undertook to maintain a Tentative List of potential sites for World Heritage Site nomination, and to nominate national heritage sites on this list to the World Heritage Committee for World Heritage listing. The last time it produced such a list was in 1992.
The Hill of Tara, which is considered the ceremonial and mythical capital of Ireland, is the centrepiece of a large archaeological landscape with hundreds of significant sites. It is said to be the location of St. Patrick’s conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the early fifth century. It is also the coronation site of Irish kings between the sixth and twelfth centuries.
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