An Irishman's Diary

MY YOUNGER son goes to a Gaelscoil in Islandbridge, one of central Dublin’s leafier areas. But for a while in the early hours of Wednesday, it must have been a Gale-scoil too, because when the kids arrived for class yesterday, they were greeted with a scene of arborial carnage.

A mini-tornado had ripped though the school grounds overnight, uprooting whole trees and slicing off branches. It had also clearly done a solo run, untackled, across the adjoining Civil Service GAA pitch.

Immediately beyond the pitch, on the tree-lined approaches to the Memorial Gardens, the damage was even worse. The storm had cut a swathe along the avenue, leaving at least four trees down or seriously wounded, and the road impassable. A team of forensic OPW men were already in place, cordoning off the crime scene with tape.

The same road was the focus of world attention last year, when a certain very famous person from England was chauffeured in for a ceremony at Lutyens’s war memorial. Its proximity to the event meant that our school had to close for the day, making the queen’s visit very popular locally, at least with the four-11 age group.

But even in the days beforehand, the area was getting a lot of attention. Some of it was cosmetic, like the new carpet of grass laid along the road margins, where car parking had left unsightly bald spots. More of it was prophylactic.

Along with Operation Spanner, which involved lifting and sealing every manhole cover on the route and then spray-painting the shape of a wrench on it, the road into the gardens was subjected to closer inspection than a potential gold-medal exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Among other things, soldiers carefully trod the grass along the route in the days beforehand, checking that there was nothing more than vegetation planted there.

But yesterday morning, it looked in retrospect like the real terrorist threat – unsuspected at the time – had been the trees. Certainly had the tornado hit 17 months ago, dissident, axe-wielding republicans would have been suspected of involvement.

The trees which crashed down in Islandbridge are of fairly recent vintage and their passing hardly amounts to a tragedy. Even so, their plight reminded me – as wind-felled trees always do – of a song called Bonny Portmore.

It’s a very old song, and like many of its age, exists under different titles and with varying lyrics throughout these islands. The best known version, however, appears to have been a lament for a tree.

The “great oak of Portmore” was in Antrim, on the northern shores of Lough Neagh. And although it was felled accidentally, in a big wind of 1760 or thereabouts, its fate symbolised that of the once-famous Irish oak forests, whose demise had nothing to do with the weather.

It has been said that in ancient Ireland, such was the tree cover, an athletic squirrel could have travelled from Antrim to Kerry without touching the ground. But even allowing for poetic exaggeration, this was once one of the most densely forested countries in Europe. Then in the course of a few centuries, it was almost denuded.

In part, the problem was that – unlike those miserable coniferous plantations that pass for most forestry now, the native deciduous trees occupied prime agricultural land. But it was probably the golden age of sail, particularly the era when Britannia ruled the waves, that really did for the great forests.

Long before Harland and Wolff, the supply of top-grade timber made Ireland a mecca of ship-building. “The Irish build very good ships,” said Sir Arthur Chichester, who lived during the reign of an earlier Elizabeth, in the late 1500s, and noted that even then many English merchants preferred to have their vessels made here.

By all accounts, the Portmore oak was an especially impressive specimen, its trunk measuring 14 yards in diameter. It would surely have made a good ship. And although its demise was accidental, it too is presumed to have gone the way of the countless others that became masts in the Royal Navy or East India Company.

IT MIGHTbe harsh to blame Queen Elizabeth for the depredations done to Irish forestry by her predecessors. After all, the process probably started with the Vikings. The largest long-boat yet excavated in Denmark was made from Irish oak, circa 1042 AD.

And anyway, it was all a long time ago now. Most of the damage had already been done by the 18th century, when a French visitor said of Ireland that it no longer had enough wood “to make a toothpick”.

Despite which, in his 1997 book, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Thomas Pakenham could still argue that Britain and Ireland – 60 of whose best examples he was profiling – have more old trees than anywhere else in Western Europe, France included.

But everything is political here, trees being no exception. Thus a group of forestry enthusiasts, the Woodland League, did indeed take the opportunity of last year’s visit to suggest that royal reparations were in order.

And as the butchered trees yesterday reminded me, the queen did make at least a gesture during her visit to Ireland’s arboreal fallen. It went relatively unnoticed amid the wreath-layings in Islandbridge and Parnell Square. But on the occasion of her visit to Áras an Uachtaráin, she did also plant an oak.