The White Cow Goddess and the Meatpacking Plant

Located in the east of Ireland, the River Boyne flows north-eastwards from County Kildare into County Meath before emptying into the Irish Sea north of Dublin. In the Irish folkloric telling, the River Boyne (Bhóinn) was created by the Irish goddess Boann. She travelled from Brú na Bóinne to the Well of Segais, in which knowledge-bestowing hazelnuts fell, nourishing the salmon within. She walked counterclockwise around the well, agitating it sufficiently for it to burst forth and rush to the sea. Boann was washed away, becoming part of the river that she created. It was from this river that the legendary Fionn mac Cumhaill captured the Salmon of Knowledge, which had gained wisdom from feasting on the hazelnuts (MacKillop 2004). These myths point to the entangled connections existing between humans, other-than-humans and beyond-humans within the Irish landscape. Modernity unbraided these connections, but engaging myths as a form of intangible heritage might serve to reunite them.

Bhóinn is interpreted to mean ‘white cow’, making the plans of Dawn Meats to construct an effluvia pipeline that will discharge treated wastewater from its slaughterhouse into the River Boyne especially poignant. The Dawn Meats’ Slane abattoir currently uses tankers to transport wastewater to a treatment plant. The company plans to construct a 7.2 km pipeline connecting the slaughterhouse directly with the River Boyne, asserting it will reduce the plant's carbon emissions by an estimated 286 tonnes per year (O'Looney 2021: 29). This is akin to annually removing fifty-eight gasoline powered cars from the road. This pipeline will discharge 400,000 litres of treated wastewater per day into the River Boyne, a Special Area of Conservation and Special Protection Area that provides drinking water for 70,000 people. The World Heritage Site of Brú na Bóinne, including its megalithic passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, is located 6 km from the discharge point. Dawn Meats applied for planning permission to the Meath County Council, which approved the planning application. The Save the Boyne campaign submitted an appeal to the national planning body, An Bord Pleanala. As of August 2023, no decision has been made on whether or not the project can proceed.

Authorised and Alternative Engagements with Heritage

The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report submitted as part of Dawn Meats’ planning permission application includes an evaluation of the potential impacts the water pipeline project might have on cultural heritage and the natural environment. Its chronological description of human habitation in the region is based on the material evidence people left behind with no mention of the folklore of the River Boyne. The EIA notes that the area ‘can be considered as of heritage and cultural value’ (O'Looney 2021: 47) and that heritage would be impacted by the project. However, it also notes that the pipeline construction might prove a boon to cultural heritage due to the potential to ‘retrieve information’ via archaeological excavations (O'Looney 2021: 364). Heritage, per this material culture assessment, is seen through the scientistic-materialist lens (Winter 2013). According to the subject–object ontology of the Western intellectual tradition, the river contains physical properties and associated flora, fauna and landscape features. But its myths are disassociated from the river itself; indeed, they are absent from the EIA. By reducing the River Boyne to physical properties, the river is an object unnecessary for the perpetuation of its myths. Dominant environmental and heritage ontologies do not allow for the possibility that the river could contain its own spirit and its own cultural heritage – indeed, the EIA asserted there was no overlap of cultural heritage and water in the proposed water pipeline project (O'Looney 2021: 358).

On the other hand, the Fairy Council of Ireland (Comhairle Sióg na hÉireann) and its associated group, Women of the Water (Mná na Uisce), show the importance of River Boyne myths and gesture towards the river's animacy. The Fairy Council of Ireland (n.d.) is a network of individuals and businesses that serves to ‘empower people to actively participate in their own living culture’. The association with fairies is explained on their website: ‘We are the children of this Land. We were told fairies don't exist, but the Good People are still here, doing the Good Work in the Good Land. We are remembering’. Members’ connection with heritage exists outside authorised heritage apparatus; their contemporary affiliation with na sióg (‘fairies’) signify an alternative view of Irish heritage than the rational, scientific approach of the AHD.

The Women of the Water postulated that connecting the river to its mythology could inspire the ecological conservation of the river (Save the Boyne n.d.). They created the campaign website, issued press releases and built a coalition to object to the pipeline project. A flyer was circulated to encourage the submission of objection letters, stating: ‘It is the site of many of our most cherished myths, home of the Salmon of Knowledge and Boann . . . in short a natural and cultural treasure . . . it is up to us to protect it for future generations!’ (Humble 2022). The Women of the Water issued a call for film-makers ‘with an interest in ecological preservation through cultural remembrance’ (Anonymous a n.d.). This call resulted in the production of a short film, Is Míse Boann – I Am the Boann (Coogan 2022). In the film, poet Siobhán Da Paor's poem ‘Is Míse Boann’ is narrated in Irish. The poem's English translation runs as subtitles, reading ‘I am Boann/ I am a thousand years of rain/ . . . Old myth in contemporary lines’. Underwater and overhead shots show a woman floating in the placid river. The montage of images, sounds and words depicts the river as nature and the river as goddess.

Boaters, tourism operators, environmentalists and even local cattle farmers have been active in the campaign. Many within the campaign would not attribute the Salmon of Knowledge or the goddess Boann as propelling their engagement. Indeed, other environmental and economic arguments feature strongly in the campaign. Nonetheless, the river's myths are part of the cultural and spiritual significance of the River Boyne for the Women of the Water and Fairy Council of Ireland. These myths provided impetus to act. Over 400 letters of objection were submitted to the Dawn Meats planning case (Comyn 2022). Save the Boyne campaign organiser Tommy Martin attributed much of the campaign's effectiveness to the work of the Fairy Council of Ireland.

Broadening Heritage Ontologies

Zongjie Wu and Sou Hou assert that considering heritage differently might ‘change the historical consciousness, cultural logic and political aspirations embedded therein’ (2015: 48). Applying a relational ontology and decolonial imaginary to the River Boyne illuminates such alternative heritage conceptions and potential implications for the field of heritage. A decolonial climate imaginary acknowledges the intrinsic worth of the living world that surrounds us. It foregrounds as most vital ongoing connectivity (Rose and Robin 2004) amongst human, other-than-human and beyond-human actors. A relational ontology sees the mutually constitutive character of an interconnected living system (Chao and Enari 2021; Harrison and Rose 2010). Such an imbrication of many beings is depicted in the mythology of the River Boyne, showing the animacy of the Irish landscape. The hazelnuts infuse their wisdom into the well water. Boann desires such wisdom and embodies it when she becomes the river itself. The salmon, swimming in that wise water, make Fionn mac Cumhaill a man of great knowledge. The hazelnuts, the salmon, the well, the goddess, the man, the river: all are connected in a physical, mythological and, indeed, epistemic way.

A decolonial imaginary sees the river as a being with its own intrinsic spirit and, like a human, as a natural and cultural being. Women of the Water founder Shannon Smith shared this sentiment as she described the broader aims of the group: ‘Falling back in love with the water, treating her as the beautiful sentient being that she is, and showing that love by becoming a steward of your local water source and taking care of it’ (quoted in McCabe and Sussman 2022). The campaigners acknowledged the co-constitutive relations between humans and the river and that such relations require tending to when they asked for a film that would communicate ‘what we do to the water we do to ourselves’ (Anonymous a n.d.). Indeed, humans are composed of freshwater. The River Boyne provides drinking water for humans and others, as well as irrigation water for the farms that generate our alimental nourishment. The river provides peace and solace to humans. Humans receive such care from the river that we must reciprocate this care as a form of mutual custodianship. Out of respect for the natural-cultural being of the River Boyne, the Save the Boyne campaign turned intangible folklore into tangible acts of care, including through an organised river clean-up.

Heritage has a vital role to play in climate transitions (ICOMOS 2019). It provides a meaningful impetus to take part in collective organising and engagement with climate issues (Lafrenz Samuels 2016). Heritage will be summoned both to justify climate mitigation and adaptation and, as indicated in this case study, to block certain climate change responses. Heritage is a selection process, in which individuals and societies evaluate what inheritance is worthy of becoming a continued legacy. Heritage practitioners as well must evaluate our inherited epistemological frames to determine what stymies socio-ecological health and what generates resilient living systems. This requires reflexivity as we consider what kind of worlds we animate and extinguish through our work.

Conclusion

Chao and Enari note that there are ‘structural factors that render some imaginations more powerful and lethal than others’ (2021: 47). Dominant discourses see climate change as a scientific and technological issue, in which specific technological applications need to shift energy sources and use, rather than as the physical manifestation of a culture based on its own myths of limitless growth achieved through extraction (Nightingale et al. 2020; Riedy 2020; Stoddard et al. 2021). In this view, it is appropriate to threaten the integrity of the River Boyne so that a meat-packing plant might reduce its emissions. The approach is to reduce emissions from a single plant, not to conceptualise solutions that eliminate harm and certainly not to reform the dominant economic system from which the emissions derive. If professional heritage discourses continue to kowtow to dominant ontologies of separation and the instrumentalised uses of natural and cultural ‘resources’, we risk continuing to sacrifice our dwindling ecological connectivities for robust gross domestic products. Such a sentiment is expressed within the sample objection letter shared on the Save the Boyne campaign website. ‘I cannot help but wonder’, it reads, ‘how we have strayed so far from our path as a society that these sacred sights are seen merely as a tourist trap and that the beautiful river flowing past them, with all the history and mythology it carries in its currents, is treated as nothing more than a meat factory effluent dump’ (Anonymous b n.d.). Engaging the entangled natural and cultural ontologies associated with decolonial heritage approaches invites us to consider holistic solutions that do more than transfer the locus of harm. Broadening our imaginative and discursive frames might help to recognise and foster life-giving legacies for people, rivers and the heritage intrinsic to both.