Fragments on Trees & Ireland
1. Stumps
First, they took the trees.
Oak into ribs for ships.
Ash into tools.
Elm into scaffold.
Each cut a census.
Each stump a claim.
We walked the emptied fields
like orphans
calling for a mother
without a name.
2. Silence
Ireland—
least forested in Europe.
No statistics needed.
Just listen.
Hear how the wind
never softens
without leaves.
3. Ribcage
Afterward, the land
was a ribcage.
Bone-white.
Weather-beaten.
A body without cover
held open
to its captor.
4. Monoculture
Spruce in rows.
Foreign uniforms.
They say reforestation.
We say forgetting.
A plantation is not a forest.
It is a factory
of silence.
5. Eco-colonisation
Elsewhere, trees mark belonging.
Elsewhere, borders grow green.
Here, absence
was the proof.
Look, they said.
Even the forests
obey.
6. Inheritance
My father cut turf,
spade striking black veins
of ancient roots.
He said nothing.
But the sound
was history—
knocking.
7. Greenwashing
The state sells pine
as healing.
As climate care.
But trees remember
the hands
that plant them.
They know apology
from disguise.
8. Proof
Trees outlive treaties.
Testify in silence.
An oak:
I was here
before your maps.
A grove:
This land remembers
its true name.
9. Protest
Sometimes forests return
through rage.
Saplings planted
in secret—
a language slid back
into a child’s mouth.
Sometimes a tree
is a banner.
A refusal.
A promise
to outlast the flag.
10. Ireland
We have never recovered.
We walk treeless lanes
like wounds.
We teach our children
shade is a myth.
And yet—
each acorn
is a small rebellion.
each leaf
a prayer older
than empire.
Ethnographic Note
This poem is situated at the intersection of ecological loss, colonial extraction, and moral governance. It proceeds from the premise that environmental devastation is never accidental. It is organised through regimes of ownership, development, and repair that distribute vulnerability unevenly and render certain forms of loss historically acceptable.
The poem is informed by my ongoing COALESCE Research Ireland project with the DCU Water Institute (with Prof Fiona Regan and Dr Gordon Ogutu), which examines climate adaptation and nature-based solutions in Ireland through a design justice framework. This research asks who defines environmental “repair,” whose knowledge is mobilised in restoration projects, and whose histories are marginalised in official narratives of sustainability. It attends not only to forestry and land use, but to water systems, coastal erosion, dune degradation, river management, and recurrent flooding. Across Ireland, climate breakdown is increasingly experienced through collapsing shorelines, saturated fields, overwhelmed drainage systems, and the slow unravelling of coastal and riverine communities.
In contemporary policy discourse, these crises are often framed as technical problems to be solved through engineered defences, monoculture planting, and market-led “nature-based” interventions. Yet such approaches frequently reproduce earlier patterns of enclosure and exclusion, privileging efficiency, carbon accounting, and property protection over ecological integrity and social repair.
Ireland remains one of the least forested countries in Europe, a condition rooted in centuries of colonial extraction, plantation economies, and agrarian restructuring. The poem traces this history not as distant past, but as a living inheritance, inscribed in landscapes, labour, and family memory. Deforestation, drainage, and coastal modification appear here not simply as environmental damage, but as forms of political violence that have reshaped relations to land, water, shelter, and belonging.
Drawing on my research, the poem questions contemporary “green” narratives that present restoration as neutral care. It suggests that without sustained attention to justice, participation, and historical accountability, climate adaptation risks becoming another mode of erasure. Against this, the poem foregrounds fragile practices of refusal, remembrance, and regeneration. It treats trees, waters, and coasts not as policy instruments, but as witnesses to dispossession and as precarious carriers of alternative futures.