If your taste in travel extends more to archeology and sacred sites than to Dublin pub crawls (not that there's any reason not to do both!) then you should consider visiting the Hill of Tara, the ancient “omphalos” or sacred center of the entire island.

In the pseudo-histories of the medieval Irish storytellers, Tara is portrayed as the ancient capitol of the Irish kings, but the archeology of the site does not support this. Tara seems actually to have been a ritual site rather than a political capitol, but it was a ritual site associated with the sacred kingship. Kings would perform a ritual marriage with the goddess of sovereignty in order to legitimate their rule. It was believed that good harvests and prosperity depended on this ritual.

The stone structures at the Hill of Tara date back about 5,000 years, to the Neolithic era. Some of them appear to be arranged for specific astronomical alignments having to do with the dates that later became traditional Gaelic festivals such as Samhain and Imbolc. When you reflect on the fact that Tara was spiritually significant to the most distant ancestors of the modern Irish, it is truly awe-inspiring to think that it still retains some portion of that symbolic importance even today. The Hill of Tara is located in the Tara-Skryne Valley along the M3 and N3 motorways. Because of the road construction, there is a great deal of controversy about the most effective way to protect the archeological sites here.