How blight caused the Great Irish Famine

Jimmy Breslin explores the history of blight in Irelan

At first, it seemed to be nothing. It was a curled-up dark brown leaf about the size of a good lock of hair and it was preserved in glass in a room in the Fairlow Herbarium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A typewritten card alongside the leaf said that it was taken from an infected potato plant in Ireland during the famines of 1845-50. I looked at the leaf, read the card and began to walk away and, of course, did not leave. Here in this glass case was the weapon used by the earth when it turned against man and nearly ended a nation, the leaf that determined the character of its people, wherever they were, for generations at least. Behind the glass case, on long shelves, was an impressive line of books. There also was in the room a man who could help me decipher some of the written matter. I decided to forget about taking one of the morning shuttles to New York. I sat at a table. Usually, when you are around relics of things Irish, you hear in your mind a song or have the feel of a smile.

This time, the hand went for a book. At the time of the famine, the man in charge of the room observed, mycology, the study of fungi, was only beginning. People from a couple of places in the world went to Ireland to collect blighted plants and then took them back to their laboratories to study. But they could give Ireland no help.

By the time the famine was ending, the potato fungus was only being given a name: “phytophtora infestans.” One of the things most vile about the use of a dead language is the manner in which the message of horror becomes lost in the struggle to absorb the habitual syllables.The man in the Fairlow Herbarium suggested one of the books, The Advance of the Fungi by E.C. Large. The author noted that in good weather the potato fungus reproduced sexually. However, when conditions were constantly wet and chilly, the fungus reproduced asexually, and at great rapidity. On two occasions during the famine years, there was a chill rain that did not seem to end. Fungus appeared wherever the land was wet. Potato leaves became brown and started to curl up and the potato underneath became purple and mushy. With no food, over a million died and millions fled.

The book says that experiments over the years show that the blighted potato was edible. Because of the fungus causing the inside of the potato to break down, much of the starch turned into sugar, thereby giving the potato a strange, sweet taste. This is something that can be said in the safety of a laboratory. But while a million were dying, people tried to eat the potatoes and found they could not.

The potato originates in the Andes Mountains of Peru, where it grows in many varieties. However, the English, who introduced it to Ireland in the 16th century, planted only one variety, the clone, and it is susceptible to the wet fingers of fungus. With no second variety of potato plant to withstand the disease, the blight became total. The Irish, ignorant of all this, planted any eyes which seemed even vaguely uninfected and prayed that the next crop would be clean. But the new plants were as infected as the ones from which they came.

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Nster.com