Irish Potatoes Aren’t From Ireland, Aren’t a Variety, and Aren’t Always White: What the Name Means

An Irish potato is a regular potato. The University of Arkansas puts the species name right in the heading of its home-garden fact sheet, “Irish Potatoes – Solanum tuberosum,” and that is the same plant as every russet, red, yellow and blue potato you can buy. The name isn’t a variety, it doesn’t mean the plant came from Ireland, and it doesn’t mean the flesh is white. Purdue’s horticulture department says it bluntly: the potato is “also known incorrectly as Irish potato (but is not from Ireland) and white potato (but there are yellow and red types).”

So why does the label survive? Because “potato” once needed a qualifier, and this one stuck. This article follows the word back to the sweet potato, lays out the two explanations extension services give for the “Irish,” covers the blight that made Ireland’s potato famous, and tallies who still prints the term. No dictionary or extension source reviewed here dates the first use of “Irish potato,” so where the record runs out, the text says so.

What is an Irish potato?

“Irish potato” is another name for the common potato, Solanum tuberosum, a member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae). It covers every kind of tuber on the shelf: the University of Arizona’s Backyard Gardener sheet titled “Irish Potatoes” lists “heirloom, russet, yellow, white, red, blue, fingerlings, and more” under the one name. (Our purple potatoes guide covers the blue end of that list.) Dictionary.com files “Irish potato” and “white potato” as alternate names for the same plant in both its American and British entries.

The table below decodes the names you’ll meet on seed packets, catalogs and farm forms.

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The takeaway: “Irish potato” names the crop, not a type inside it. The one true outsider is the sweet potato, which NC State Extension says is grown “for edible roots” and is “only distantly related” to the potato. The name has a non-garden use too. Philadelphia’s “Irish potato” is a sugary candy that NBC10 Philadelphia describes as “not actually potatoes.”

Why did “potato” mean the sweet potato first?

The word “potato” started out naming the sweet potato. Dictionary.com traces it to Spanish patata, a variant of batata (“sweet potato”), from Taíno, and dates the English word to 1545–55. Texas A&M’s horticulture history of the crop reaches the same place from the other direction: the “batatas” in the accounts of Columbus and Magellan “indicate sweet potatoes rather than white potatoes.”

The dates matter. The sources below disagree about when the white potato reached Europe, but none puts it before 1565, which is after the English word was already on record.

My reading of those dates: English speakers had a “potato” (the sweet one) for at least a decade before the white one showed up, and the newcomer borrowed the name. Once two plants shared it, one needed a qualifier, which is the job “sweet” does from one side and “Irish” does from the other. That sequence is an inference from the dates, not a documented etymology.

Where did the “Irish” come from?

Two extension sources explain the “Irish,” and they point at different events. Texas A&M says Ireland adopted the potato before other European countries or their American colonies, and that the plant “became firmly identified with Ireland; hence the name ‘Irish potato,’ which persists in the United States today.” Arkansas gives a boat instead: “In 1719 Irish immigrants introduced white potatoes to New England, and now white potatoes are often called ‘Irish potatoes.'” Texas A&M adds that those immigrants settled Londonderry, New Hampshire.

Both explanations agree on what “Irish” is not. The potato was domesticated in the Andes. Spooner and colleagues’ 2005 PNAS study of potato DNA found “a monophyletic origin of the landrace cultivars,” meaning a single domestication, in Peru, and Arkansas notes that potatoes were already cultivated from Chile to New Grenada when Spanish explorers arrived. “Irish” describes who grew the crop and carried it, never where it came from.

Neither explanation is a linguistics source. The Dictionary.com entry lists “Irish potato” as a synonym with no date or origin, so treat the 1719 story and the “identified with Ireland” story as extension-service history, not settled etymology.

The Famine: the best-known Irish potato story

The Great Famine is the event most people connect with Irish potatoes, though none of the sources reviewed ties it to the name. In 1845 the oomycete Phytophthora infestans reached Europe, spreading from Belgium across the mainland and then to Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland suffered most because its population depended on potatoes more than other parts of Europe did. Yoshida and colleagues’ 2013 eLife analysis puts the toll at around one million dead and roughly another million forced to leave the island. Miles Joseph Berkeley identified the pathogen in 1846, and Birch and Cooke’s eLife commentary describes it as a “water mould.”

Sequencing of 11 infected leaf samples collected in Ireland, Britain, Germany and Canada between 1845 and 1896 showed a single clonal lineage, called HERB-1, that persisted for at least 50 years. It hasn’t been seen in modern times. Yoshida’s team found it was a close relative of the US-1 lineage that replaced it outside Mexico in the twentieth century.

Why one lineage could do so much damage is partly a gardener’s point. Arkansas tells growers to start potatoes from a “seed piece” rather than true seed, which means each plant is a genetic copy of the tuber it grew from. That is my inference, not a finding in these papers: a crop propagated as clones hands a pathogen lineage a field of identical hosts. It fits why Arkansas and Arizona both push certified seed potatoes today, and our potato diseases guide covers late blight symptoms once plants are up.

Who still says “Irish potato”?

Five of the seven extension pages checked here use “Irish” in the title, and all five come from the South or Southwest. The federal record uses it too. The table lists each source as retrieved.

So the term isn’t only a Southern habit. It sat on the 1850 federal farm form, alongside its own sweet potato column, and USDA ran a crop-report series under that title for 14 years. What the guides show is where it lingers in garden publications: Gulf and Southwest extension offices keep it as the crop name, while the two northern offices write “potatoes,” and Iowa flags “Irish” as a misnomer.

One limit on that reading: no source reviewed measured how people talk, only how agencies write, so a claim about Southern cooks specifically would go beyond the evidence. My guess is that a qualifier survives longest where sweet potatoes are an everyday crop, since both show up on the same forms and in the same gardens. That is a hypothesis, and the sample is seven pages found through search, not a survey.

What does the name mean in your garden?

Nothing changes: an “Irish potato” guide is a potato guide. What does change is the calendar, and the reason is temperature. Arkansas says tuber formation peaks at soil temperatures of 60 to 70°F and fails at 80°F, which makes potatoes a cool-season crop. That is why the Southern guides plant in late winter. Alabama says February. Arkansas gives early to mid February through early March in the southern part of the state, early March to early April in the north, and July 15 to August 1 for a fall crop.

Where the guides disagree is seed-piece handling, so here they are side by side.

My reading: a 1½- to 2-ounce piece with two or three eyes satisfies all three eye rules, and the real split is the wait, from same-day planting in Arkansas to nearly a week in Alabama. None of the three sheets, as retrieved, cites a trial for its choice, so pick one method and stick with it for the season.

All three agree on one point: don’t plant supermarket potatoes. Alabama says “Do not buy potatoes from a grocery store for planting,” and Arkansas explains why: many fresh-market potatoes have been treated to prevent sprouting, and potatoes have a rest period that must break before the pieces will sprout. Both recommend certified seed.

The Arkansas cultivar table also shows why the label confuses people. Under the crop heading “Irish Potatoes” it lists a cultivar named ‘Irish Cobbler,’ described as a round white tuber that’s early and well adapted. The crop is the Irish potato. ‘Irish Cobbler’ is one variety of it.

Once shoots are 6 to 8 inches tall, Arizona says to hill them with a few inches of soil, and our potato hilling schedule gives the heights stage by stage. For pest pressure, potato companion planting covers what to grow nearby, and the full potato growing guide has zone calendars. If a seed catalog said “Irish potato” and your list also has sweet potatoes, our sweet potato growing guide covers that separate crop, and the sweet potato vs regular potato comparison lines the two up in the garden.

Frequently asked questions

Is an Irish potato different from a regular potato?

No. “Irish potato” is another name for the common potato, Solanum tuberosum. The University of Arkansas lists its “Irish Potatoes” fact sheet under that species name.

Are Irish potatoes always white?

No. Purdue notes there are yellow and red types, and Arizona’s “Irish Potatoes” sheet lists russet, yellow, white, red, blue and fingerling types under the one name.

Do Irish potatoes come from Ireland?

No. Cultivated potatoes trace to a single domestication in Peru, per Spooner and colleagues’ 2005 study. Ireland adopted the crop later, and Texas A&M and Arkansas tie the name to that adoption, not to the plant’s origin.

Are Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes related?

Only distantly. NC State Extension places the potato in the nightshade family and the sweet potato in the morning glory family, and Arkansas notes that potatoes are not roots but underground storage stems called tubers. The sweet potato is grown for its edible roots.

Is Irish potato candy made from potatoes?

No. NBC10 Philadelphia describes the Philadelphia candy as “not actually potatoes.”

Can I plant grocery-store potatoes?

Alabama Extension says not to, and Arkansas explains that many fresh-market potatoes are treated to prevent sprouting. Buy certified seed potatoes instead.

Sources

1. University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Service. Andersen, C. R. Irish Potatoes (Home Gardening Series, FSA6016)
2. Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Irish Potato (Grow More Give More card, ANR-2876). Alabama A&M University and Auburn University, 2023
3. University of Arizona Cooperative Extension. Irish Potatoes (Backyard Gardener #158)
4. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. Easy Gardening: Irish Potato. January 25, 2022
5. LSU AgCenter. Irish Potatoes (home vegetable gardening)
6. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. Growing Potatoes in the Home Garden. Yard and Garden, reviewed July 2024
7. North Dakota State University. Growing Potatoes in the Garden. NDSU Potato Extension
8. Texas A&M horticulture. Vegetable Travelers: Potatoes. plantanswers.com
9. Purdue University Department of Horticulture. Tropical Horticulture Lecture 28: Other Tropical Starch Crops
10. NC State Extension. Edible Sweetpotato, Ipomoea batatas. North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox
11. Dictionary.com. potato (etymology and alternate names)
12. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. 1850 Agricultural Census Schedule (NA Form 14131d)
13. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. Irish Potatoes (crop report series, 1958–1972). ESMIS
14. Spooner, D. M., McLean, K., Ramsay, G., Waugh, R. and Bryan, G. J. A single domestication for potato based on multilocus amplified fragment length polymorphism genotyping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(41), 2005
15. Yoshida, K. et al. The rise and fall of the Phytophthora infestans lineage that triggered the Irish potato famine. eLife 2:e00731, 2013 (preprint)
16. Birch, P. R. J. and Cooke, D. E. L. The early days of late blight. eLife 2:e00954, 2013
17. Durante, D. and Lynch, C. Irish potatoes (Philadelphia candy). NBC10 Philadelphia, March 14, 2025