TaraWatch

Hello there and welcome to TaraWatch.org. We are fighting to save the Hill of Tara from the M3 motorway. We are planning a candle lighting ceremony for the Celtic Feast of Lughnasa, Sat July 30. Below is a map of the locality.

click image for larger image of possible routes
We are considering various routes, but most probably we will walk from Skryne, to Rath Lugh (no.21 on larger map), and then across the N3 and up to Tara for sunset, where we will release candle lanterns into the sky. We also hope to twin up with other heritage sites under threat around the world, so if you are interested, let us know please. salafia-at-gmail.com

Ireland on Sunday
2005-10-09John Lee, political correspondent,

Major developers who are also financial backers of Fianna Fáil stand to make millions from the controversial M3 motorway which conservationists say will destroy the historic Hill of Tara.

A company controlled by multi-millionaire builder Joseph Murphy Jr – whose main business, JMSE, was exposed as corrupt the Flood tribunal – owns valuable lands along the route.

So too does multi-millionaire Fianna Fáil backer Cathal McCarthy, formerly a business partner of Frank Dunlop, the corrupt former government press secretary, and of Des Richardson, a close friend of the Taoiseach.

Both Mr Murphy and Mr McCarthy stand to make millions from the sale of land needed for the motorway – which campaigners say will destroy some of our most important archaeological sites – and for the construction of intersections.

But Mr Murphy, in particular, stands to make even more substantial profits from the hundreds of acres of land which he owns within a few miles of the motorway route and which may well be opened up for development once construction is completed.

Support for the M3 route formed a major part of the Fianna Fáil campaign in Friday’s by-election – even though archaeologists and ecological activists have compared it to Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and insist that it should be preserved.

Mr Murphy faces an investigation by the Criminal Assets Bureau after playing a central role in the Flood/Mahon Tribunal into planning corruption.

Mr Murphy and Frank Reynolds, the former managing director of JMSE who was also condemned by Mr Justice Fergus Flood, are beneficial directors of Newland Properties Ltd with an address at Ashley House, Batterstown, Co Meath.

Newland Properties owns 26 acres in Roestown, Ratoath, Co Meath, of which five-and-a-half acres are subject to compulsory purchase by Meath County Council for construction of the M3.

But in recent years, Newland Properties has bought up more than 130 acres in nearby Ratoath, Dunshaughlin, Dunboyne and ther parts of south Meath near the proposed route.

Though the CPO on the five-and-half acres is expected to net the company about €5m, the real potential for profit is in its other properties beside and near the M3 route. Inevitably, there will be pressure to rezone this land for housing and industrial development – a move that would bring in millions more for the two building magnates, according to property experts.

Frank Reynolds said the company owned more than 100 acres “if you take in Dublin and other places”. “I think if you ask anybody whose land will be affected by the M3 or N2, they would say they’d rather have the land. I wouldn’t say I’d make a killing on it. You can’t do much with land that has a road running through it”, said Mr Reynolds.“I don’t know if you can do much with it building-wise as people don’t want to live by a motorway”.

Land Registry documents show that Newland Properties also has a massive land portfolio in Dublin. JMSE has made huge financial contributions to Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats.

Tribunal star James Gogarty, when accompanying Joseph Murphy and another corrupt building tycoon, Mick Bailey, to a 1989 meeting with now jailed ex-minister Ray Burke to make a corrupt €30,000 contribution, innocently asked: “Will we get a receipt?”

“Will we f***,” was the reply.

Cathal McCarthy, meanwhile, has made millions from the development of Navan town centre in partnership with another rich developer, Gerry Duignan. IoS has seen files that show Mr McCarthy owns 12 acres at the most controversial interchange on the motorway – right beside the Hill of Tara, ancient seat of the High Kings of Ireland.

An additional 200-acre landback beside the interchange site was transferred to the name of Mr McCarthy since April 2004. The land is highly valuable given its proximity to the interchange and the M3. Opponents of the current route of the new motorway argue that the 29-acre, floodlit interchange will damage the Hill of Tara.

It has also been learned that in 1999, Mr McCarthy and Mr Duignan – registered with the Public Offices Commission as Duignan & McCarthy, PO Box 44, Navan, Co Meath – contributed £30,500 to Fianna Fáil.

The contributions are listed as ‘£2,500 for attendance at a fundraiser, £3,000 for attendance at a fundraiser and £25,000 for attendance at a fundraiser’.

The Sunday Times

April 23, 2006

Company awarded N6 contract caught in corruption probe

Enda Leahy

THE parent company of an Irish construction firm awarded a €100m contract to build a section of the Dublin-Galway road was investigated for contract bid fixing and corruption, it has emerged.

Two employees of Jacobs Engineering, a multinational construction company, were convicted last year in America for their role in obtaining confidential details of competitors’ bids for an $800m (€650m) building project. During the trial it was alleged that Jacobs’ employees got inside information about rival bids for a convention centre in Chicago from a lobbying company it was paying. It subsequently won the contract, worth $11.5m (€9m), after reducing its estimate by more than one-third.

Last week Jacobs’ Irish arm, which lists American and Canadian-based directors on its accounts, was awarded the tender to provide engineering, procurement and construction services for a 20km stretch of road on the N6 between Ballinasloe and Athlone. The National Roads Authority (NRA), one of the bodies that awarded the contract, said it was unaware of the corruption investigation, conducted by the US attorney’s office. It said the tendering process it adopts is rigorously checked and all candidates are vetted for their ability to successfully and efficiently carry out a contract. There is no suggestion of any impropriety in relation to the N6 tender.

Jacobs has been operating in Ireland since 1974. The Irish company’s immediate controlling firm is Jacobs Engineering Espana SL, but the company’s ultimate parent is Jacobs Engineering Group Inc in America. Last year James Nagle and Elizabeth Koski, former employees of the American-based company, were sentenced to five years’ probation, given a $4,000 (€3,250) fine and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service for their role in the Chicago scandal.

Nagle, who was the Chicago office manager and the company’s chief operations manager in charge of obtaining the contract to expand the Chicago Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (McPier) building, said senior staff throughout the company were also aware of secretly obtained information relating to their competitors’ bids for the deal. The company initially submitted a bid of $18.8m (€15.2m) but dropped it by $7.3m (€5.9m) to win the contract. This was after Nagle received inside information about a rival’s bid from Ronan Potts LLC, a lobbying firm.

In documents filed by the US attorney’s office, Nagle claimed the decision to reduce the bid was taken at an internal meeting of Jacobs personnel brought in from throughout America. The documents alleged: “At no point . . . did any Jacobs official object to having the information. To the contrary, the information was discussed in a routine manner throughout the process by [Nagle’s] supervisory panel.” In the months after the case, a Chicago schoolboard sued the company to recover $28m (€22.7m) after Jacobs’ renovations of three local high schools came in over budget.

Last week, inquiries to Jacobs in Ireland were passed to spokespeople in Scotland and America who refused to comment other than to say Nagle and Koski had been fired, and that winning the Galway contract was a success. The project, with a value of approximately €100m excluding land costs, is scheduled for completion in 2009. Jacobs is also designing a stretch of the N6 from Kinnegad and Kilbeggan after winning another tender last September.

The NRA said: “There are background checks in the tender process, but if any civil or criminal action has been taken against an organisation, particularly where there is a finding and they’ve been to trial and paid their dues, they would not be excluded from contractual contests.”

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Jacobs Engineering gets Ireland contract – Businessweek

Road deal with Jacobs – Galway Independent

Jacobs engineering case puts past contracts under scrutiny

NRA PRESS RELEASE<

National Roads Authority Appoints New Chief Executive

12th January, 2005

Mr. Barry (53) is currently Managing Director of Jacobs Engineering Ireland Ltd. from where he brings extensive experience in the design and construction of private and public sector projects both in Ireland and in a number of international locations.

A graduate of UCD in Civil Engineering, Mr. Barry worked on construction projects in Canada and Nigeria, before joining Jacobs in Dublin in 1980. During the 1980s he was promoted through various positions in contracts administration, project management and construction management. He moved to the USA in 1990, heading up Jacobs’ business in Northern California. He was appointed Managing Director of Jacobs Ireland in 1995. He spent a number of years in the UK as Managing Director of Jacobs UK business, returning again in 2000. He has also studied law in the Kings Inns and was called to the Bar in 1986.

Announcing the appointment, Mr. Peter Malone, Chairman, NRA said

“The Board is delighted to secure an executive of Fred’s calibre with proven technical and leadership qualities. This appointment underlines our commitment to deliver on the Government’s ambitious development programme creating a spine of high quality national routes between the nation’s cities for the common good. Fred will lead the NRA team in delivering on this mandate with an investment of up to €10 billion over the next five years, through a combination of the public purse and private investment, to developing an efficient and safe national network of motorways and main roads.”

For further information please contact
Caroline O’Brien, Communications Officer 01 6602511, Ext 254 086 6049430

New roads boss appointed on €300,000 salary package – Sunday Independent

Thu, Jan 13 05

A NEW chief executive has been appointed to the National Roads Authority (NRA) on a salary package in the region of €250,000 a year plus a performance bonus of 50pc, writes Treacy Hogan. Fred Barry (53), currently managing director of Jacobs Engineering Ireland Ltd, takes over in the top job from next April.

In a statement yesterday Peter Malone, NRA chairman said the appointment underlined its commitment to deliver on the Government’s ambitious development programme creating a spine of high quality national routes. “Fred will lead the NRA team in delivering on this mandate with an investment of up to €10bn over the next five years, through a combination of the public purse and private investment, to developing an efficient and safe national network of motorway and main roads,” he said./a>

The new chief executive is a civil engineering graduate of UCD and worked in construction projects in Canada and Nigeria before joining Jacobs Engineering in Dublin in 1980. Mr Barry also worked for Jacobs in the UK and the US. He succeeds Mr Michael Tobin.

Meath Chronicle

Sat, Apr 22 06

John Donohoe

Vincent Salafia, who lost the recent High Court case against the M3 motorway, is today (Wednesday) giving Notice of Appeal of the decision to the Supreme Court. Notice will be officially given by Mr Salafia to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government; Meath County Council; the Attorney General and the National Roads Authority, who were all parties to the case.

The challenge by Mr Salafia to the proposed route of the M3 motorway near the Hill of Tara was dismissed on all grounds by the High Court in March. Mr Justice Thomas Smyth ruled Mr Salafia was not entitled to succeed in any of his claims because of an unjustified two-year delay in bringing them. He considered all the arguments made by Mr Salafia, including claims that certain provisions of the National Monuments (Amendment) Act 2004 were unconstitutional, and rejected all of those.

The judge ruled the legislature is entitled to regulate land and road developments in the interests of the common good, even where that involves interference with property rights and national monuments. The Act had introduced changes in relation to how national monument protections were controlled, the legislature was entitled to choose to give qualified protection to national monuments and the court could not strike down section 14 of the Act, as sought by Mr Salafia, simply because a different or better balance could have been struck, he said. Mr Salafia had asked the court to make a declaration that the greater Tara landscape – the Hill of Tara/Skryne Valley – is a national monument or a complex or series of national monuments within the meaning of the National Monuments Act, but the judge declined to do so.

Mr Justice Smyth said there were differences between Mr Salafia and between Mr Salafia’s experts as to what constituted the core Tara area. In those circumstances and in the absence of any representation in the proceedings for people in the Tara area who would be directly affected by such a declaration, it was not permissible for the court to make any such declaration.

Among other key findings of Mr Justice Smyth was that even if the Supreme Court upheld arguments in its forthcoming judgment on the Carrickmines Castle case that Section 8 of the National Monuments Amendment Act was unconstitutional, he was satisfied that protections for national monuments, which he held were built in to Section 14 of the same Act, were “constitutionally sound”.

Meanwhile, TaraWatch, a group supporting Mr Salafia’s case, says it will continue to lobby the Government to halt work in the Tara Skryne Valley on all archaeological sites. While TaraWatch maintains that all monuments in the valley are part of the national monument of Tara, by association, two newly discovered monuments at Collierstown and Baronstown are discrete national monuments in their own right, and should be protected. The NRA archaeologist, Mary Deevy, points out that these sites have not been fully excavated yet, and were included in the report furnished to Minister Dick Roche prior to his decision on excavations along the route.

They are known about since 2004. Preliminary topsoil testing and removal was carried out on the sites which are possible prehistoric or early medieval. The Baronstown site is a large ditched enclosure complex which was a possible ritual enclosure or settlement complex, while the Collierstown site, a single pit with an intact pot, was a burial site.

write to ken@meath-chronicle.ie / brian@meathchronicle.ie

Please distribute this poster and ask people to link to TaraWatch.org

PRESS RELEASE

11 April 2006

‘Protest at Historical Artefacts Sale’

TaraWatch will join with others in protest against the sale of historical artefacts at Adams and Sons Auctioneers, Stephen’s Green, on Wednesday 12th April at 11.30 am.

Adams and Sons Auctioneers are selling off a large number of historical artifacts relating to the 1916 rising. These include the orginal of Peader Kearney’s Soldier’s Song, the tricolour alledged to have flown over the GPO during the rising, and various letters, photos and memorabilia of the leaders.

Surely these items belong in a museum, to be viewed by all?

Believing that these artifacts belong to the Irish people and not to some individual who has a bit of money, there will be a protest outside Adams and Sons (located on the north side of St Stephens Green) at 11:30 on Wednesday 12th, the day of the sale.

Vincent Salafia, who is involved in a legal action against the State over the Hill of Tara and the M3 motorway said:

“The “Independence” sale is symbolic of the current attitude of this State towards our national heritage. Everything is for sale. Every inch of land, from shore to shore, no matter how consecrated, has a price. Historical sites, graveyards, buildings, artefects, and national symbols of every description are up for auction, to the highest bidder. And the largest seller, rather than purchaser, is the State.

“What self-respecting State can spend 9 million euros a day on roads, and not even 1 million for its own family heirlooms? Instead of seeking to link us with our past, there is a sense that we are being separated from it.

“With the sale of publicly owed lands bringing in hundreds of millions of euros, perhaps a restriction should be placed on money earned, to ensure that a certain amount is spent preserving and purchasing other sites and objects of undeniable national importance?

ENDS

For more information please visit http://www.tarawatch.org and http://www.hilloftara.info

A fundraising gig is being organised by TaraWatch for the campaign to save the Hill of Tara from the M3 motorway. It will be held in Tuesday April 18th at Dice Bar, on the corner of Queen Street and Benburb Street, in Smithfield, off Aaran Quay on the Northside of the city.
Alice Jago, Longtails and other musicians will perform live.

For more information see:

http://www.alicejago.com

http://www.myspace.com/longtails

Contact: Vincent 087-132-3365 salafia@gmail.com

The Tara Lapel Pin: light, simple pins costing only €2.99 each, all proceeds to the Tarawatch Litigation Fund

Postage apx: ROI 48c; UK 50p/75c; USA and ROW $1.30 /€1

The postage is the same up to ten pins.

Available through paypal: charlesbyrne@ireland.com

through Ceolnet: www.ceolnet.com

or call into

Charles Byrne Musik Instrumente

21-22 Lower Stephen Street Dublin 2

Tara in Old Irish Literature:
The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel: Tara and the Law

One of the most famous references to Tara in Old Irish literature is in the story
“The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel”.
This story is part of the Uliad or Ulster Cycle, which concentrates on the stories of Conchobhair (Ulster) and Maebh (Connaught). The Tara related stories instead tell of Conaire Mór, an important King of Tara whose reign brought great peace and prosperity. In the pseudo history and genealogy of Irish kings, Conaire Mór succeeded his stepfather Eterscel as “high king” of Ireland. In effect as there never actually was a true high king, he succeeded as King of Tara and Leinster. He had many followers from other provinces, such as Conall Cernall and Cormac, son of Conchobar. His reign marked a period of peace and prosperity, until his foster-brothers broke his law for pillage.

Conaire Mór was burdened by many “geis” magical taboos imposed on Heroes and Kings in ancient Irish sagas. He tried hard not to break them, thus ensuring that he ruled with “Firenne” or instrinsic Truth, bringing prosperity. However his partiality for his foster brothers led him to break one of these gies, by not imposing the Law of the land on them for their misdeamenours. This sparks off a disastrous chain of events which leads to the destruction of the King and his followers at Da Derga’s hostel.
Conaire Mór was a Law giver: he settled disputes both between separate tuatha or between individuals, banning and punishing cattle raids and clan wars. Violence was not tolerated. His reign was marked by a period of peace, and all of Ireland prospered: the duns were flourishing, the weathers were kind, allowing bountiful harvest. However, the moment he decides to put himself and his family/cronies interests above the law, he brings disaster. The law, based on Firenne, is a sacred concept, and cannot be avoided, cheated or bent.
Another lesson about the law is taught by Conaire Mór: that once we bend it, we are on a slippery downward slope. Conaire Mór’s geis when he came to power were:
· He must not circle clockwise around Tara and anti-clockwise around Bergia.
· He must avoid hunting the monster of Cerna.
· He must not leave Tara every ninth night.
· He must avoid sleeping in a house that shows firelight after sunset.
· He must not interfere with a quarrel between his two thralls.
· He must prevent raid and looting during his reign.
· He must not follow three Reds to the House of Red.
· After sunset, he must not allow a man and a woman enter the house he was staying.
Conaire Mór rationalizes the breaking of one law – he allows his own foster brothers to evade punishment for pillage and looting – and it all goes downwards from there.
Conaire Mór prophesies the destruction of Tara, recounted by the bandit Ingcél:

He slept again, and awoke there out, and sang this rhetoric:
“The howl of Ossar* . . . a battle he announced: enslavement of a people: sack of the Hostel: mournful are the champions: men wounded: wind of terror: hurling of javelins: trouble of unfair fight: wreck of houses: Tara waste: a foreign heritage: like is lamenting Conaire: destruction of corn: feast of arms: cry of screams: destruction of Erin’s king: chariots a-tottering: oppression of the king of Tara: lamentations will overcome laughter: Ossar’s howl.”
He said the third time:

The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel is available online: the most commonly used version is the Whitely Stokes, D.C.L. Epic and Saga, Harvard Classics no. 49 New York, P. F. Collier & son [1910]

The Special “save tara” Edition of the PPP www.paganpoetrypages.com is now up and running and available for your delectation. Please read, enjoy and be inspired…this time to get involved and to help others get involved in the campaign….

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