Prof. Heaney added: "I suppose Tara means something equivalent to me to what Delphi means to the Greeks or maybe Stonehenge to an English person or Nara in Japan . . .It conjures up what they call in Irish dúchas, a sense of belonging a sense of patrimony, a sense of an ideal.

"The traces on Tara are in the grass, in the earth. They aren't spectacular like temple ruins in Greece but they are about origin, they're about beginning, they're about the mythological, spiritual source - something that gives the country its distinctive spirit".