It’s the wearing of the green weekend, all forty shades of it, as we celebrate the feast day of our National Saint, Patrick, the man who it is believed, banished the snakes from Ireland.

In Patrick’s name, we dye rivers green, we drink green beer, we paint shamrocks on our faces, buttocks and bums, we pin this small obscure green plant to our breasts, to remind us and the world that we are Irish.

Few of us will care that the man whose feast day we celebrate on the 17^th March, was born in England, considered himself a Roman and had no great love initially, for the pagan inhabitants of this island whom he thought of as barbarians. He would be pleasantly surprised to know that sixteen centuries on little has changed. Few parading the streets of Dublin or New York would acknowledge what their forefathers and mothers believed, that the shamrock was used by Patrick to illustrate the nature of the Holy Trinity symbolic of the Christian tradition.

Fewer still would believe that the wearing of the green, identified world wide with the emerald isle and its people has very little to do with March 17 and St. Patrick. The colour green has its origins in an ancient Celtic fertility rite, when green bushes were burned and the ashes scattered over the fields to make them fruitful.

But such myths and beliefs do little harm. As children we were taught at school that Patrick was born somewhere in Britain and that when he was a boy he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and carried off into slavery from where he escaped some six years later and that he loved us Irish so much that he returned to convert us to Christianity in the face of strong opposition from the Druids.

Whatever the truth we Irish love St. Patrick. For centuries we have named our children for the Saint. We have taken him with us when we were banished from our land by hunger and death. Over the centuries we have marched and paraded and celebrated his name, in music and song, in pilgrimage and prayer. We have died for St Patrick and the shamrock, and for the wearing of the green.

Patrick in his day travelled in a land of educated people, Druids, poets, teachers, and lawyers, scribes, presided over by a High King, who was crowned on the ancient site of Tara, in County Meath.

The noble history of the High Kings and the Tuatha are told in our language, music and song and it is this tradition which Irish people all over the world will celebrate this weekend.

Why then, you may ask, are the Dublin Government, their lawyers, politicians, and police, doing their best to destroy this ancient site as they have destroyed so many others. And if they succeed in this destruction, they will remove from this planet what is left of a civilisation that inhabited this land long before St. Patrick.

The poet and Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, has compared the destruction of Tara, to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001, an action that then shocked the civilised world.

Tara is to be destroyed to make way for a motorway.

The cost to the taxpayers of the destruction of this most Irish and most ancient of sites, the natural heritage of this island, is estimated to be around one billion Euros and rising. This, at a time when the Taoiseach is forecasting a serious down turn in the economy of the Republic.

What other country in the world with a dependency on the tourist industry would destroy one of its most important tourist attractions. But that’s precisely what Fianna Fail and its ‘green’ partners have decided to do.

The question needs to be asked. Who has given this Government the right to destroy the ancient heritage that has belonged to the people of this island for over four thousand years, as old as the Pyramids?

Can you imagine the Government of Egypt destroying the Valley of the Kings or the English destroying Stonehenge or the Greeks destroying the Oracle at Delphi? Apart from the fact that these are part of an ancient world that tells us much about the civilisations that lived in those times, the millions of annual visitors to such sites bring in much needed revenue to the economies of those countries.

Fianna Fail has argued that we need this motorway to relieve congestion around Dublin, without producing any real evidence to substantiate such a claim. Indeed it has been proved by the N50 that motorways in fact do the opposite. They bring more cars onto the roads.

The Dublin Government could have rerouted this monument to the” Celtic Tiger,” to the west of the valley or provided a rail infrastructure which would cut down on carbon emissions.

The decision to sabotage an official World Heritage Site for a motorway that may save commuters twenty minutes off their journey has been condemned by poets and playwrights, academics and archaeologists, and people from every walk of life on this island and all over the world.

It has been left to the young and the people who make up the Save Tara campaign to defend our ancient heritage while the politicians jet off to far away places to ‘celebrate ‘the patron Saint of an island whose heritage they are systematically destroying in the name of progress.

Those defending the ancient site have been threatened and intimidated and some of those occupying a tunnel directly under the motorway route may be in grave danger from the Gardai who moved in on Friday to arrest the demonstrators.

While we are drowning our shamrocks in the name of St. Patrick, and celebrating out Irishness we would do well to remember that in future years we may have little to celebrate. Our ancient sites, the origins of a people that survived dungeon, fire and sword will be no more. We will have that most hideous of sights, the snake like queues of traffic trampling over the graves of Irelands ancient places and when we can see through the smog of carbon monoxide emissions, we can tell out grandchildren that the brown earth around this modern day orifice,   was once a green fort where kings were crowned, and St Patrick walked, before Fianna Fail and global warming, wiped it out.

For the first time in this century, the palm and the shamrock will meet. Older people regarded such an event as an omen of misfortune. Perhaps their superstitions were well founded, for it seems that many of the snakes that Patrick claimed he had banished are still around to oversee the destruction of Tara.

                         Article written on 8^th March 2008 by Mary Nelis and printed in ‘The Sunday Journal’ Derry City