Irish Lumpers

I exist because of a potato; a potato covered in lumps called a Lumper. Original, eh?  Not an oompa loompa but a Lumper.

I know that there are many other factors besides these potatoes that have lead to my existence; factors from all over the world: from France to Ireland; from England to Denmark; and finally Australia.

However, if the lumper had not come to be, I would not exist.  I could have been a Margaret Thorkelsen, whom my mother would have chosen to marry instead of Stanley Charles James Hastings, whose ancestors migrated from a small village in county Limerick called Shangolden in 1850.

But Lumpers were and I am.

They came originally from Mexico; or somewhere around that part of the world; carried back to other parts of Europe in the holds of ships which had previously taken migrants to the new world, all hoping for a better life. Lumpers existed everywhere throughout Europe.  They had one fault: they were susceptible to 'the blight', a disease particular to some potatoes that resulted in them decaying into a gooey black mess.  Just like I am susceptible to insect bites of any kind and sea sickness, car sickness, to name but a few reasons that I disintegrate  Let's include rejection in that select group.  Fortunately, I do not disintegrate into a gooey black mess in most cases...except in the case of romantic rejection.  Why doesn't Alan Rickman, AKA Severus Snape know my name or love me?  Why don't I have a man who has been attached to me for the last forty years as he is to his wife?  Hence I have every reason to be, from time to time, a gooey black mess.

Lumpers!  They were not the only things to become gooey black messes rotting in the fields of Ireland in the 1800's.   On the roads, there were bodies too.  Left to rot where they lie, starved and homeless, evicted on the word of their English landlords, often by their fellow Irishmen.  They had a pretty hard time of it, both those Lumpers and now those lumpless piles of ragged bones who were forced to wander the roads.

Famine had occured throughout the history of Ireland.  But the Irish, had usually survived.  Howevwer, by the nineteenth century the majority of them had become reliant on their homegrown potato crop for survival.  Other areas of Europe were also effected by the blight; but they weren't as dependent on the Lumper as the Irish. 

The great potato famine happened at a time when their English Landlords were removing the small farmers from their land for more commercial like farming..sheep and cattle production in particular. Ironically, Ireland, at this time, was exporting huge crops of wheat and other agricultural products to England.  Whilst I was in Ireland, one old Irsihman had the hide to balme the Irsh women for the deaths of over a miillion Irishmen during the famine.  I presume he was referring to their reluctance or inability to adapt to other food sources!

I was also told that the farm I was staying on, which was owned by the man who married my great, great aunt, had potatoes when nobeody else did. This I had found very hard to believe; until I realised  on further research, what the Lumper had done.  The  Cregans obviously weren't growing Lumpers!!

When one looks at this map, which includes the village of my ancestors, Shanagolden, one realizes why millions of the Irish were pushed form their land, died on the streets or were lucky enough to migrate to distant parts of the world. 

Of course, there were other factors at work all based on the religious prejudice of the English; denial of catholic education, university education, any employment in the bureaucracy, right to vote, failure to allow or encourage industrial manufacturing, the eradication of small farms.

But I blame the Lumper.  Yet, because of the Lumper, I am!