Since 2007, we have been patient and responded to all public consultations to have Tara included in the UNESCO Irish World Heritage Tentative list.

Given the worldwide interest in the Tara issue, we are hoping the Minister will give us all something to celebrate on St Patricks Day by submitting the Irish list just a little bit early?

The Minister's secretary envisions it will be in for the April deadline for this year. We hope to ensure that vision becomes reality. read full story / add a comment

In an old schoolhouse in north Donegal people gather to grant St Brigid permission to cross the threshold. She carries an armful of freshly cut rushes with a white cloth tied around them. They are laid on a long set of tables, and slowly men, women and children go up gather some rushes up to make the traditional St Brigid's crosses. read full story / add a comment

A campaign to save Brú na Bóinne from the Slane Bypass has been launched online over the weekend. It is being initiated by members of the National Monuments Forum, which includes Professor George Eogan, Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at University College Dublin. The National Roads Authority has chosen the most damaging route for archaeology and heritage, and Meath County Council has gone ahead and issued CPO orders for the route, without even waiting for the An Bord Pleanala oral hearing. A petition will be launched shortly, calling on Minister Gormley to deliver on his promise of a new National Monuments Act, and calling on UNESCO to place
Brú na Bóinne on their List of World Heritage in Danger. read full story / add a comment

As predictions for the death toll from the Haitian earthquakes rise over 200,000, ABC News have reported that planes carrying medical equipment and relief supplies are having to compete with soldiers for the valuable slots at Port-au-Prince airport which was taken over by the US military after the quake. Since the start of the great anti-slavery republican insurrection nearly 220 years ago, Haiti has been presented as a dangerous place incapable of running its own affairs and requiring foreign intervention. Yet the reality is its people were the first enslaved population to deliver themselves from slavery and also carried out what was only the third successful republican insurrection on the planet. The threat of this good example was rewarded with centuries of invasion, blackmail, the robbery of Haiti's natural resources and the impoverishment of its people. This articles summarizes that history of intervention and the resistance to it in order to put into context what is happening in Haiti after the quake read full story / add a comment

A brief look at Irelands lost history of genocide and slave trading. A call to re-engage the spirit of revolution that burns deep in the contemporary Irish psyche and use this common heritage to take serious consideration of once again uniting the Island of Ireland. Peace and unity within the borders of our own land. read full story / add a comment

Every secret of art, every subtlety of knowledge, and every diligence of healing that exists, from the Tuatha De Danann had their origin. And although the Faith came, these arts were not driven out, for they are good.(1) read full story / add a comment

The French chattering classes are reacting to the news that Sarkozy wishes to move the body of Albert Camus from his grave in Lourmarin in southern France where he was buried after the car crash which killed the then recently Nobel Laureated writer and his publisher to the Pantheon in Paris where France has collected over 70 "illustrious dead men" and one "radioactive woman". Camus will be the second individual claimed by anarchism to be given a place in the Pantheon following the pacifist and anarchosyndicalist opposer to WW1, Jean Jaures moved there in 1924). Camus would be the first Pantheon resident to have been born in Algeria. His kids don't want him moved at all. However, I see in this a consistent concern I have articulated over the years at how contemporary regimes and society abuse the memory of the dead and use their legacy :-
.:.The Selective & Collective memory : Memory as fetishised community : Communality as fetishised memorial.:. read full story / add a comment

Book Review - England's Greatest Spy. Eamon De Valera by John J. Turi read full story / add a comment

In the late 1970s and early 80s Dublin was a city spinning out of control due to the first devastating epidemic of heroin addiction. Inner city communities were under siege as drug users converged from all over to buy drugs in their flat complexes. By early 1983 hundreds had died as a result of drug related problems. Ordinary citizens mobilised and took to the streets in an attempt to stop the sale and distribution of drugs which were killing their families, friends and neighbours. read full story / add a comment

For years now, we have been reading about plans for the Leinster Orbital Route (LOR) or Dublin Outer Orbital Route (DOOR). Earlier this year, the NRA published a Feasibility Report from 2007, which shows route of the LOR passing along the side of the Hill of Tara. Notably, the route goes about 1km north of the Blundelstown Interchange, between the N3 and M3 motorway. However, last week Meath County Councillors were told to freeze planning on a 2km corridor on either side of the route. So, it is possible the route will pass directly through the Blundelstown Interchange, the Hill of Tara complex and the proposed UNESCO World Heritage Site. In fact, it appears that this was the plan all along, and that the route has been chosen before the public consultation even begins. read full story / add a comment

The Mound of the Hostages... read full story / add a comment

As I write thousands of people, the vast ,majority of them Irish are assembling at the largest public worship building on this island in eager expectation of a Marian apparition. The Roman Catholic church runs Knock and played a vital role in the building of the basilica, local economy, airport & marian cult.

Mary is thought by Catholics to have made her first apparition within a generation of the death of Paul and the apostles on a column perhaps more apt for a sceptic philosopher in what is now the Aragonese city of Zaragossa. Since then she has been held to appear on a roughly bicentianeal basis throughout Europe with some notable gigs in Latin America, none in Africa or Asia.

This might tell us more about the kind of people who see, expect to see or have thought they have seen her than it would indicate any particular favouritism on her part. Each time she has appeared she has been reported as bringing news for the world, after all & not just the typically poor communities. read full story / add a comment

Between defending Junket John O’Donoghue and propping up the sales of Bertie Ahern’s biography, Eoghan Harris, has taken time out to fall out with his old UCC history professor, John A Murphy.

What is the spat about?

Eoghan thinks that 140,000, 60,000 or 40,000 Protestants (take your pick) were driven out of Ireland during or after the War of Independence. John A thinks it a fine old theory, but devoid of evidence, essentially codswallop. It is a view Eoghan has been peddling without fear of contradiction in the Sunday Independent, which is presumably why John A has tackled the appointed (by Bertie) Senator in the Irish Times. There, Murphy can get the former Karl Marxist and Rupert Murdochite, now Tony O’Reillyist, on a more even scribbling field.
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All good children are now washed and asleep in their cots and ought have little idea how their parents & elders intend to vote tomorrow in Ireland's 2nd referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. Theirs is not the duty nor the concern to weigh local political and national debate with the long term consequences of a potential post-Lisbon European Union. For the most part they will have noticed the plethora of posters and the volume of bilge wash which the Irish voters have seen and been brought through since immediately after they voted No! in the first Lisbon referendum and which has continued unrelentlessly as a tsunami until this last evening of reflection.
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The Green Party has lost it's mandate to represent the people of Ireland, and in particular, the environmental movement in Ireland. The latest scandal involves Gormley's own promises as Minister, to strengthen legal protections for national monuments and landscapes. In 2007 he promised new legislation the following year. Then it was promised for 2009, and formally described as The National Monuments (Amendment) Act 2009. Last week we informed by the Taniste that the bill will now not be published until 2010, at least. This is a core Green Party issue, and there is simply no excuse for the delay, which is costing Ireland's heritage dearly because of the high destruction rate continuing under the Green watch. TaraWatch is calling on all environmental groups to protest at the Green Party Special Convention on Saturday 10 October at 9.00am. read full story / add a comment

Collins 22 Society launches revamped website enhanced resources include site-wide search, streaming media and a new emailing facility.New Website Launch Coincides with International Investment Fund For Collins Documentary read full story / add a comment

The Irish Times reported on Friday, August 28 2009 that a 9,000 year old fishing trap was found in the Hill of Tara landscape at Clowanstown, near Dunsany, during excavations by the National Roads Authority (NRA), along the path of the M3 motorway. Settlement remains of agricultural, industrial and ritual nature were discovered amongst five man-made mounds, beside an ancient lake. Stone axes, jewellery and even a tiny wooden canoe were unearthed. The finds show once again that the Tara landscape masks an underground world of Irish pre-history, which should have been either left alone, or excavated as part of a proper research study, rather than as part of an archaeological salvage operation. read full story / add a comment

The US National Security Archive has in the last hours presented unto us its National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 282.”. There is both tension & worry in the two South American states with the largest and best equipped military forces, Chile & Brazil at the decision of Colombia to host 7 US bases as reaction to the decision by Ecuador not to renew the US lease on its “Manta base.
In the last week the 6th democratically elected president of Brazil, Lula called for a meeting with Obama to discuss the US bases and said "the climate of unease disturbs me". Indeed the Brazilian government had already refused US overtones to use its base at Recife. I really think a considered glimpse at these new declassified files might be of interest to readers As such this article on the 6th Brazilian military dictatorship figurehead and Nixon follows my text yesterday entitled “The new Latin American century, FARC, arms races, US bases & sundry fibs”. read full story / add a comment

Despite being hugely in debt, removing murals commemorating Cork’s history seems high on the agenda of those in City Hall.

That was the message clearly shown when Cork City Council recently removed tributes painted by Ógra Shinn Féin to the former TD and Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, and the Roll of Honour of Fianna Éireann, Chorcai.
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Ógra Shinn Féin Dublin has condemned the attack on a statue commemorating Irish Patriot Seán Russell.

Unknown individuals painted Nazi flags on the base of the monument late on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning and also poured red paint over it.

The new bronze memorial to Seán Russell,a veteran of the Easter Rising and IRA chief of staff during the bombing campaign launched in London in 1939, stands in Fairview Park in Dublin and was only recently unveiled by the National Graves Association following the destruction of a previous memorial by vandals in 2004.
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