Three years ago, to celebrate the Millennium, every household in Ireland received a certificate saying that a native tree had been planted in their name.
Over 1.2 million oak, ash, birch, alder, and Scots pine were to be grown at 16 sites throughout Ireland, both north and south.
The response from the public was "almost universally positive," said Mr Gerry Egan of Coillte, one of the partners in the project and owner of 12 of the native woodland sites.
Because of the overwhelming response, the Millennium Committee, headed by the then government chief whip, Mr Séamus Brennan, adopted the forests as one of its flagship schemes.
But what of them now? How many of the young native trees are thriving? Who manages the woods, and what is the long-term plan? Coillte, which was given the management role, despite complaints from Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) that there was no tendering process, said the planting has gone remarkably well.
"Whether it was the Millennium or not, someone was definitely looking down on us because we had a very high survival rate," said Mr Egan. "Virtually nothing had to be replanted.
"When the idea was first put forward the immediate concern was that 1.4 million plants would have to be produced. There was always a risk that there would be some failures."
But FIE is highly critical of the project. "It was fraudulent to promise every household a tree for generations when at 3,000 - or 5,000 - stems per hectare the final number of trees left at maturity will be only a few hundred.
Mr Egan disagrees: "This is an attempt to distort what this project is about.
"What we undertook to do is to restore and renovate native woodlands and as part of that to plant a tree for every citizen. Nobody who knows anything about woodlands would think there'd be 1.4 million trees in 100 years." Rather, he said, "the focus was on creating holistic ecosystems".