A FORESTER friend commented favourably on a suggestion made here a week or so ago, that a forest in remembrance of all who worked for the foundation of this State, Free Stater or Republican, be laid down in this 75th anniversary year.
of the Treaty. In memory of the faith and work and striving of those men and women who, perhaps, had less dividing them than seemed at the time as the work of de Valera in office might suggest. But that's getting into politics.
The point of the suggestion was just trees for all who could be seen as founders. Medals may be struck, statues or plaques go up, but a forest, self perpetuating, living, breathing, is a monument of beauty in itself, and in variety of species can stand for the complexity of thought and temperament that went into the making of the State.
Start, if you will, in modern times, more or less, with Eoin Mac Neill and Douglas Hyde in founding the Gaelic League, or through the Irish Volunteers (Mac Neill again) and all the endurance and high spirits and tragedy that culminated in the setting up of native rule over this space we inhabit in the 26 counties. Our forester friend thought that fifty acres would be needed to give magnitude and variety to the concept. Trees are symbols of peace, stillness, growth and strength. Not that some stone or other memorial should not be incorporated with the forest. (The house at Coole is gone, but the woods are still there). Some body, Coillte, perhaps, with a direction from the Government, could do the country, a fine service.
Trees come up often in Ernie O'Malley's book On Another Man's Wound. "I wandered through the garden amongst the glossy green of the rhododendron leaves. I sat near the blasted pine and under the pink and white buds of the apple, trees." Three of them had planted slips from a tulip tree. When the three were killed, the slips were to be planted on their graves. But the slips died.