The campaign to stop the construction of the M3 through Tara has gone online with an Internet petition attracting over 2,000 "signatures" in two weeks.
The website www.protect-tara.org was created by Dublin woman Fionnuala Devlin (38), who has been living in Berlin for four years. She has the support of the Rhein-Main German-Irish Association in Frankfurt.
Ms Devlin launched the Internet campaign after learning of the planned motorway during a trip to Tara in May.
"I was surprised when I started research that there is no compelling reason for the motorway to go through Tara," she said. "It seems to me that this is not clear to people. The debate is so detailed that people don't realise that (the M3) is going to go through Tara."
The website brings together the history and legend of Tara as well as the history of the proposed motorway development. Visitors to the website are urged to write to the Taoiseach or to electronically sign the linked petition. By yesterday afternoon the petition had attracted 2,278 signatures, mostly from outside Ireland in the US and Germany.
"Tara IS the soul of Ireland - don't squander it!" said one American visitor to the website.
An outraged German wrote: "The pre-Christian cultures and nature religions have suffered enough."
Another German implored: "Do not rape your green island with grey streets."
A surprising number of signatories to the petition come from Estonia, which has been experiencing its own burst of motorway building through heritage sites.
Ms Devlin says the main reaction of most Germans she knows has been shock. "People really emotionally connect to Ireland. The image Bord Fáilte has been presenting abroad so diligently all these years could almost be summed up in Tara, so there's shock that the Irish Government is spending more money to destroy that, with the help of EU funds."
