Garden of Remembrance

In the autumn of 2008, President Mary McAleese opened the County Mayo Peace Park and Garden of Remembrance in Castlebar, completing a personal campaign by Michael Feeney that began in 1999 when he noticed how many local soldiers had vanished into the world wars. The green space holds names from both global conflicts and even Mayo natives who bled for the United States in Korea and Vietnam, yet critics still call it a British monument because it avoids the blood of the Easter Rising. That omission creates a strange wound in the stone; the garden remembers half the county's tragedy while pretending the other half never happened.