It's funny the repercussions of women going to work outside the home. The waves of cause and effect have rolled even into the realm of the homely spud. For instance, the rise in popularity of the soapy King Edward potato was mainly because women who were out working all day didn't have time to be minding a tricky pot of floury potatoes that could disintegrate into mush at any time.
Or so says Peter O'Connor, chief executive of Irish Potato Marketing (IPM). And mores the pity, because the Irish - "the only country in the world that eats potatoes with a very high dry-mass content" - have a deep affinity for the floury spud. In fact, it's almost in our genes. "It goes back to the idea of sitting around the farmer's table, and the woman comes in with a big pot of potatoes. And you can hardly see the person on the other side of the table for the clouds of steam, and they break open and there's more steam . . ." says O'Connor, looking a bit misty himself after this trip down memory lane.
But floury potatoes are still available to the modern woman - and man. Roosters, bred at Oak Park Research Centre in Carlow, and launched in 1992, are a wonderfully fluffy variety. "There is nothing in this country that will beat Roosters," O'Connor claims. "They have a 25 per cent greater yield than Kerr's Pinks or Records, the traditional main crop varieties." And the best way to cook them, he says, is to steam them, not to boil them.
Marcel de Sousa, IPM's marketing co-ordinator, begs to differ. "No, you can microwave a medium one, for about 10 minutes, with a napkin underneath it, and it is delicious. I find it's sort of creamy really."
IPM was founded in 1950 by a group of potato merchants. "They were visionaries who realised after the war, that with trade opening up there was an opportunity to export seed potatoes from Ireland," O'Connor says.
After about 10 years of exporting existing varieties of potato, a breeding programme was set up at Oak Park to develop new varieties. One of the first to emerge was the very successful, main-crop Cara, now the third most popular potato in Britain. Cara has a good resistance to blight, and it is exceptionally high-yielding: these qualities made it the choice of IPM to send to Ethiopia during the 1987 famine, when they shipped 1,000 tonnes.
The multi-talented Cara has good breeding properties also, and is used as a parent variety in every breeding station in Europe - of which there are about two dozen.
Breeding potatoes is a lengthy, intense business, and because the parent potatoes are always hybrids rather than pure species, all sorts of offspring can be thrown up. After the cross is made, the seed matures inside the fruiting bodies, those tomato-like "potato apples" that form after the flowers fade. And as most people know, potato apples are highly poisonous, demonstrating close family relationship of potato's (Solanum tuberosum) with deadly nightshade (Solanum dulcamara).
In the first year of a breeding programme at Oak Park, 80,000 seedlings are raised, and in "a very savage selection process", 90 per cent are discarded. The following year another 90 per cent get the chop, and again the next year until there are only seven or eight plants left. And then, if any of those continue to look promising, they are planted out in disease-free fields and replanted year after year to build up the stock. Following that, they might spend a couple of years on trial in Ireland, the UK and in Mediterranean countries. And then, maybe they might be deemed worthy of being registered as a new variety: if they are distinct, stable and uniform enough.
Which is why, after nearly three decades of potato-breeding here, only 20 varieties have been registered, and only a few of those are truly commercial. Nonetheless, Ireland exports seed potatoes to 34 countries - including Cyprus, which in turn exports "ware potatoes" (spuds for eating) back to us. Last year, we sold 50 tonnes of Slaney - a child-of-Cara variety with profuse, beautiful white flowers - to Brazil, next door to Peru, the original home of the potato.
So if the rest of the world is keen on Irish potatoes, perhaps the time has come for us follow their lead. Why not jettison those old favourites from across the water, Sharpe's Express, British Queen, Record, Golden Wonder etc? And switch to our own bornand-reared Ambo, Colleen, Burren, Cara, Slaney, Rooster and Barna.
Irish seed potatoes are available in good garden centres. A range in 3-kilo packs (£3.50 each) is being piloted this year by IPM at Mackey's Garden Centre in Sandycove, Co Dublin. Next year the pre-packs will be more widely available.
Diary date: February 26th, 8.15 p.m., a garden evening with Gerry Daly, at St John's Hall, Clontarf GAA Club, Seafield Road, Clontarf, Dublin, in association with Clontarf Horticultural Society and Annesley Motors. Bring plant specimens for identification and advice. Admission for non-members: £3.