Seamus Heaney has given warning that modern Ireland is in danger of losing its unique spiritual values to the brashly secular economy-driven values of the “Celtic Tiger”.

In a lament for a lost Ireland, the Nobel laureate said that the Celtic Tiger — the catchphrase that has come to stand for modern Ireland’s economic success — was attacking the ancient symbol of Ireland: the harp.

The focus of this battle between two visions of Ireland is Tara, an ancient site sacred to pagans and Christians that is under threat from the construction of a motorway.

Mr Heaney said that, if the controversial M3 were to be forced through Tara in County Meath, where the High Kings once sat, it “will be a sort of signal that the priorities on these islands have changed”.

He added: “The Tiger is now lashing its tail and smashing its way through the harp — the strings of the harp are being lashed by the tail of the tiger.”

Mr Heaney, who is a fixture of the national secondary school curriculum, said that Tara represented “an ideal of the spirit” that was fundamental to what Ireland meant. “Tara means something equivalent to what Delphi means to the Greeks, or maybe Stonehenge to an English person, or Nara in Japan, which is one of the most famous sites in the world,” he said.

“It’s a word that conjures an aura — it conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging, a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal, an ideal of the spirit if you like, that belongs in the place. And if anywhere in Ireland conjures that up, it’s Tara.”

The Irish Government faces international criticism from archaeologists, academics and conservationists, as well as the threat of legal action from the European Commission, but it is adamant that the M3 will be completed on schedule in two years’ time to tackle commuters’ anger over journeys of fewer than 70 miles to the capital that presently take two hours or more.

The route of the road, Mr Heaney added, breached the fundamental principles that lay behind the foundation of the modern state. “The Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 summoned people in the name of the dead generations,” he said. “If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from prehistoric times up to historic times up to completely recently, it was Tara.”

While it is unlikely that Mr Heaney’s protest will halt the construction, his comments will fuel a growing debate about values in modern Ireland. The 1995 Nobel prizewinner, who is believed to account for two thirds of poetry volumes sold in Britain, said that Tara appeared to have enjoyed more protection while under British rule. He said: “I discovered that W. B. Yeats and George Moore, two writers at the turn of the century, and Arthur Griffith [the founder of Sinn Fein], wrote a letter to The Irish Times some time at the beginning of the last century because a society called the British Israelites had thought that the Ark of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill.

“They talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself, ‘If a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what is happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work’.”

Mr Heaney said that the country’s present rulers had made “a savage choice, they have made a secular choice. The Government is acting under pressure from secular motives”.

Tara is on the World Monuments Fund’s list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites.

Dr Jonathan Foyle, UK chief executive of the fund, said: “This entire site is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations and Canterbury for its Christian associations all rolled into one.”

He compared the Government’s decision to route the motorway through Tara with the actions of the Taleban in Afgahanistan, when it destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.

Lines on the land

We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.

They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.

From Bogland

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