Sir, Perhaps your readers might be interested to know what is happening with the ongoing saga of the Ballyseedy Wood Tralee dual carriageway controversy. As it happens, Kerry County Council is now saying that the alternative route, because of the objectors success in proving the importance of the wood, will now result in the destruction of five family homes and the Ballyseedy Monument, erected after the Civil War tragedy.
I find the suggestion that any of the three must be sacrificed for the dual carriageway untenable, given that one look at a map makes perfectly obvious many alternatives. In addition, it is particularly distasteful to me that one could suggest that the Ballyseedy "Monument has no connection with the wood. Since the beginning of English interference on this island, the native woods of Ireland have been the refuge and sanctuary of Irish rebels, particularly in their bleakest hours.
Ballyseedy Wood is such a place, even without the events of the spring of 1923. But on March 7th of that year, according to Dorothy MacCardle's Tragedies J Kerry, nine Kerry rebels were tied to a mine by their fellow countrymen and blown up into the wood across from which the Monument stands. The wood miraculously saved one man, while its trees and earth received the flesh and last blood of his comrades.
Since then, the roadside and woodland scars are healed, and the men of that fratricidal conflict are joined again in peace and death, as when, for the Republic, they stood back to back, in life and courage for, fittingly, the names of the fallen from both sides are cut in stone on the Monument at Ballyseedy.
Across the road, close by the Lee, is, to some of us, another monument the Irish wood that knew on that March day the blood and flesh of patriots, a wood whose seasons evoke the sacrifice and hopes of all the fallen. Beside this, such concerns as modern roads and engineers', economic savings are paltry things. And perhaps we, the living, who owe a debt we can not repay, may find it right that this corner of Tralee's last Irish native wood, where the blood of patriots spilled and where stand her tallest trees, should remain, with the Monument and the Lee, undisturbed. Yours, etc,
Castlegregory, Co. Kerry.