The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien, TD, and Minister of State with Responsibility for Heritage and Electoral Reform, Malcolm Noonan TD have announced a new World Heritage Tentative List for Ireland.

Included in the list is the Passage Tomb Landscape of County Sligo and Rathcroghan in Roscommon.

The Tentative List is an inventory of natural and cultural heritage sites that may have potential to demonstrate Outstanding Universal Value and therefore considered suitable for nomination to the World Heritage List. It is a pre-condition for nomination that a site must be on the Tentative List for at least one year before work can formally begin on a nomination dossier.

The passage tomb landscape of Sligo represents the most westerly and one of the most dramatic expressions of a remarkable flourishing of the construction of ritual monuments across Europe between five and six millennia ago. The interconnectivity of stone monuments and varied local topographies – typically involving upland cairns and megalithic tombs with high intervisibility across striking landscapes – is a potent expression of a long disappeared cultural milieu, which fostered an intense and enduring dialogue between architecture and landscape that remains unmatched in world terms.