by Mícheál Ó Dubhshláine
Back in the spring of the year I received a strange but welcome gift from a friend who came to visit us for a few days in Kerry. It consisted of one potato.
"Not very much of a gift," you might say, but this potato was a very special one. It was a "lumper," an early form of primitive potato very much in use in Ireland in the first half of the last century and famous as the potato that failed at the time of the Famine, 1845-50, which brought about an enormous change in the social history, not alone of Ireland but also of the United States.
I planted this lone potato on 15th. April and marked the spot with a bamboo rod in case I might forget where I planted it and it might be lost among the other potatoes.
It grew, slowly at first, but then began to thrive. I fertilised it, like the other potatoes, with seaweed and farmyard manure, as would have been done in those distant times. It grew strong and vigorous as I kept it free from weeds and built up the earth about it to accommodate the new tubers just as was done in those early days when everyone watched the progress hoping that a good crop would sustain the family through the winter months that followed.
The growing season of this lumper seemed longer than the other potatoes and its foliage was larger. White flowers appeared, many more than usual, and they too lasted longer than those of the other potatoes. There was one operation I allowed myself to perform that was unknown in the Famine years. I sprayed the leaves of the plant with bluestone to guard them from the "blight" or "blast" that had infested the whole crop nationwide in 1846, causing a million people to die from starvation and another million to flee from their homes and emigrate to the U.S.
The lumpers were the last potatoes I harvested. There were about a dozen healthy tubers, each with the peculiar lumps which gave the potato its name. A very basic, yellow-white, primitive, and rather ugly potato. It is said that a grown man would eat about fourteen pounds of these potatoes each day, and they were the staple food of the majority of the eight million inhabitants of Ireland. Think of it!— there are over forty million Americans of Irish extraction in the U.S. today, mostly brought there by the failure of this lumper potato in those terrible years of 1845-50. As a result, the Irish nation were scattered all over the globe and became an international race.
It is good that we should think of them at this time, the 150th anniversary of the failure of the lumpers.
Mícheál passed away in
2006. He wrote this piece in 1996 for a Celtic Traveler
newsletter.
