Dick,I email my mate about the excavation you referred to. Below is his reply which to my mind answers the concerns put by Christa Spannbauer quiet succinctly:

Hello, Hope all goes well with you.

You are right that I worked on the M3 project in Ireland and very interesting it was too. As regards Lismullen, I did some work on this but the director was Aidan O'Connell who now works at Archer Heritage.ie. The site was published as Harvesting the Stars: An Iron Age Temple at Lismullen (Wordswell) and the book got very good reviews. The whole M3 road project was controversial because of its proximity to The Hill of Tara and there was considerable protest at the time. However the route of the road is not that close and did not impact on the hill itself but only on the wider landscape (I'm not even sure whether you can see the road from the hill). Google earth it and see for yourself. There was European money involved in the project. All of the archaeological work was done to the highest of standards and was closely scrutinised by central government. The standards followed were very high including 100% resolution of all sites (i.e. everything was excavated) whereas in England a sampling strategy is adopted where anything as low as 10% is accepted. I'm not going to outline the full methodology of road archaeology here, but you will find lots of additional information on the NRA.ie website under archaeology. All the final reports used to be on this site but they seem to have gone now. Check out the contents of Seanda for general articles on the M3 and Lismullen in particular. Also Google Stuart Rathbone and see what you get as he entered into the public on-line debate with some energy.

At the end of it a great deal of misinformation was spread by those against the route - most of it wrong.

Hope this helps and a Merry New Year to you and yours

Steve