The Spuds Will Bloom in Baile Beag
There’s a scene in Brian Friel’s iconic play Translations (1980) that seems to me to speak to our current moment. Set in 1833 in the isolated village of Baile Beag/Ballybeg — literally, “little town” — in County Donegal in the far northwest of Ireland, the drama of the play centers on the threat to native Gaelic culture represented by the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s undertaking of an exhaustive mapping of Ireland during the 1830s. But there’s another threat waiting in the wings (as it were) — the widespread potato blight that would devastate and decimate the country a decade later, cutting the population of 8 million almost in half by death and desperate emigration. The 1840s have been etched in Irish collective memory as the period of An Gorta Mór — the Great Hunger — but more localized instances of the blight in the 1830s were harbingers of the catastrophe that would come.
The scene that I’m thinking of is in Act I, where the character Maire reacts to reports of a “sweet smell” in the air associated with healthy potato stalks suddenly turning “black and limp.” She is a doubter: “Sweet smell! Sweet smell! Every year at this time somebody comes back with stories of the sweet smell. Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag? Well, did they ever — ever? Never! But we’re always sniffing about for it, aren’t we? — looking for disaster. The rents are going to go up again — the harvest’s going to be lost — the herring have gone away for ever — there’s going to be evictions. Honest to God, some of you people aren’t happy unless you’re miserable and you’ll not be right content until you’re dead!” She is affirmed in her skepticism by another local innocent, Doalty, who invokes a prophesy of Colmcille, the region’s patron saint: “The spuds will bloom in Baile Beag / Till rabbits grow an extra lug.”
A lot of us were innocent doubters too when word began to spread of the spread of the novel coronavirus in our personal Ballybegs. My first whiff of how close to home the virus had come arrived in an email on March 16th announcing the “temporary” closing of my local gym. That’s when I first thought of Friel’s play and of how that “sweet smell” scoffed at in Act I is thickening the air in the final scene: “The sweet smell! Smell it! It’s the sweet smell! Jesus, it’s the potato blight!” Even then, Doalty resists: “It’s the army tents burning, Bridget.”
Now, a month later, I’m thinking of another iconic Irish play, Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968). Murphy has admitted, in the form of a rhetorical question, the revelation he experienced in the process of researching and writing the play more than a century after its dramatic setting in the darkest years of the 1840s: “Was I . . . a student or a victim of the Famine?” Sadly, we already know the answer to the equivalent question we ask in our own place and time.
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.