Just over four weeks have elapsed since Minister for the Environment Dick Roche issued his "directions" regarding the treatment of 38 known archaeological sites along the most contentious stretch of the proposed M3 motorway.
Yesterday, preliminary works involving topsoil stripping and metal detecting started under the supervision of consultant archaeologists retained by Meath County Council and the National Roads Authority.
This appears to indicate a determination to "get on with the job" as quickly as possible - in advance of legal moves to test the validity of Mr Roche's decision in the High Court as well as the constitutionality of the 1994 National Monuments (Amendment) Act, under which it was made.
In fairness to the Minister, it must be acknowledged that he made a number of changes to the draft "directions" in response to a lengthy submission from the Director of the National Museum, Dr Pat Wallace.
More time will be available to the archaeologists to carry out their excavations and, should anything that might qualify as a national monument be discovered, works affecting it must stop pending further consideration by Mr Roche.
However, it is undeniably the case - as one of the leading scholars on Tara, Dr Edel Bhreathnach, pointed out at the weekend - that what is being done is "service archaeology" in the cause of freeing up a path for the M3 motorway, rather than the more rigorous "research archaeology" that this highly-sensitive area warrants.
The director of the National Museum, which is the State's foremost archaeological authority, was surely also right when he took exception to the proposed use of 22-tonne mechanical diggers in stripping topsoil to expose buried layers. The museum has been denied any supervisory role in relation to how the various "digs" along the M3 route are carried out, other than being informed of the results.
But the argument is not primarily about how individual archaeological sites are treated or what they might yield in "finds"; it is about the impact this major road will have on the entire archaeological landscape surrounding the Hill of Tara.
As Dr Wallace noted in his March 16th letter to the Minister, Tara "is a unique cultural landscape which has significance for our national heritage that extends beyond the sum of its individual components".
Indeed, he said it was among a small number of monumental complexes that are of "more than usual importance from the standpoint not only of archaeology, but also of history, mythology, folklore, language, placenames study and, in the case of Tara, even of national identity".