Sir, – The annual live event on the shortest day of the year at Newgrange has in recent years been taken over by new-age druids and pagans who attend in huge numbers and make a racket with drums, horns and whistles. I attended Newgrange every year for more than 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s and there wasn’t a new-age person to be seen in all that time. So this is a recent phenomenon.
Such groups are misrepresenting Newgrange because they represent a different time entirely in Ireland’s history. Furthermore, Newgrange is a feat of science and engineering of the time; and surely any rituals held at the time would have been contemporary to their thinking; none of this is reflected in new-age rituals.
Newgrange is Ireland’s premier megalithic tomb and for it to be hijacked every year by such pseudo-culture is wholly unacceptable. The Office of Public Works, for historic accuracy if not for Irish national and public good, needs to put a stop to, or at least limit, the numbers of such new-agers arriving with drums, whistles and horns, ruining the experience for everyone else and arguably constituting a national embarrassment as we broadcast one of our nation’s treasured sites to the rest of the world via live-streaming. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN NOLAN,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.