The chips are down

It's a forecast no Irish person with a sense of history expected ever to hear again: a severe potato shortage looms.

- Jane Clifton

 

A surfeit of rain has delayed indefinitely the planting of next season's crops, and though the ensuing tuber outage won't kill anyone, as it did in the famine of the 1840s, it's amazing how much consternation the lack of a single staple food - however easily sourced from elsewhere - can still cause.

First, there is the sheer absurdity of complaining about the amount of rain in Ireland akin to objecting to how much pink there is in Barbie or the incidence of cat videos on the internet. This country didn't get to be called the Emerald Isle without what New Zealanders are accustomed to calling irreducible pluviality.

The island has, however, absorbed up to five times the normal precipitation.

Even within the imposed harmony of the European Union (EU), the issue of potato supply remains curiously prickly. Though widely culturally associated with Ireland, potatoes have been a staple of many countries since at least the 1500s, and there's a fierce sense of entitlement about purveying them.