Beyond Sovereignty: Tara, the M3 and Access to Justice for Cultural Landscape Destruction in Ireland

This chapter deals with the destruction of cultural landscapes in peacetime. One of the issues of focus in the current volume is the authorised destruction of heritage sites that fall through the cracks of the existing international legal framework, either because it occurs outside situations of conflict (with corresponding laws and customs of war), or the site in question is not inscribed on the World Heritage List, which is generally recognised as providing an elevated level of international awareness and protection for heritage sites and landscapes. One of the ways in which this gap has recently been addressed is through advocating human rights-based approaches to protecting heritage sites under threat, since human rights offer one of the only ways in which a sovereign decision can be challenged in an international court. However, human rights approaches throw up substantive and procedural obstacles due to, among other things, the individual conceptualisation of rights versus the collective nature of heritage and landscape; the lack of identifiable victims or palpable injury; and the diverging ways in which culture is interpreted between indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Perhaps most important is that cultural heritage, while increasingly couched in human rights terms, is still tied to public policy, and is traditionally considered to be one of the last bastions of sovereignty.