Famed Poets And Musicians To Perform At Tara

Last week, 'Save Tara' campaigners announced that an international gathering of the Irish diaspora of poets and musicians will perform at "Feis Teamhra, a turn at Tara" on the Hill of Tara, Co. Meath on Sunday 24th August at 3.30pm.

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer prize-winner, will read their poetry to honour Tara and they will be joined by internationally-acclaimed musicians including Grammy award-winner Susan McKeown, Laoise Kelly, Aidan Brennan and others.

The event will celebrate Tara on the first day of Heritage Week and will be free of charge.

The music and poetry will be performed to the backdrop of the Mound of the Hostages.

Seamus Heaney said in 2007: "for the past two millennia those generations regarded Tara as a place invested with sacred as opposed to secular value.

"Protest against the loss of this value remains an imperative".

In an interview with Diarmaid Fleming for a BBC documentary in 2008 he said the motorway: "literally desecrates an area - I mean the word means to 'desacralise' and, for centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred ground."

He referred to the 1916 Proclamation having summoned the Irish people "in the name of the dead generations" and said: "If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times... it was Tara."

Paul Muldoon wrote a poem 'Tara of the Kings' in 2006; it was put to music and played, for the first time, by his band Rackett in Navan in August 2007.

He wrote in the New York Times in 2007: "the routing of a busy road slap bang through the Tara-Skryne Valley represents an act of vandalism with not only national, but international, ramifications."

He also joined Susan McKeown in a musical, harpers protest outside the Irish consulate in New York in September 2007 when harpers in Ireland played outside the Dáil.