Why import blueberry when its Irish cousin is free?

THIS may be a foolish question, but it’s been prompted by a recent visit to the supermarket looking for blueberries and finding they had sold out.

Why do we have to import blueberries, now recognised as a fruit with many health benefits, when the blueberries’ cousin, the bilberry, grows wild in parts of the south-west, particularly in the acidic soil of boggy land.

As a child, I often spent part of the summer with my aunt in Co Kerry and I remember eating the “fraocain” that grew along country roadsides.

I never heard the English word for this fruit, but it was so delicious that I once thought I was in nature’s sweetshop and over-ate the fraocáin, with distressing consequences.

I’m not sure of the Irish spelling and am only going by the sound of the spoken word, although when I learned later in school that “fraoc” is the word for heather, I wondered if I’d been eating the fruit-of-the-heather.

I had never seen blueberries then, but when I did — hailed as a super-food and quite expensive — I thought of our own fraocáin, humble and unacknowledged.

It seems to me that this fruit, growing wild in poor land, is the bilberry and that it could be cultivated in this country so that it could vie with its flashier and imported cousin, the blueberry.

We know we can’t grow bananas, oranges and many other fruits on a large scale, but I wonder if we could cultivate cranberries, too, as they do in Maine, USA.

As a child I ate various wild Irish fruits, some such as haws and sloes tasting horrible to a young palate, and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone, although I believe it is possible to make sloe wine. I hope that someone much more knowledgeable than I am can explain why we import so much — even apples — when we live in such a temperate climate and where, in the south-west of Ireland, the land is capable of producing far more than maize.

The other climate — the economic one — is harsh and we need to rely on our own survival instincts as much as we can. Generations that have passed on used to say “when all fruit fails, welcome haws”, meaning that even the most bitter fruit was preferable to nothing at all, so that even if my musings on bilberries seem daft, perhaps they’re better than having no ideas at all.

Maureen O’Donnell

Haig Gardens

Ballinlough

Cork