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Horace Plunkett

1854–1932

 

Though he was born and died in England, Horace Plunkett was a scion of the Dunsanys and passed much of his early life at Dunsany Castle, the ancient family seat of the Plunketts, in County Meath.  He was born in Gloucester on 24th October 1854, and was a son of the sixteenth Baron Dunsany and the uncle of the well-known writer, Lord Dunsany (a family in whose ancestry lay the Irish saint, Oliver Plunkett).

      Having been educated at Eton and Oxford, he was sent to Wyoming in 1879 to recover his health, and remained there for a decade.  It is often forgotten just how large the investment of Britain was in the cattle lands of the American west in the late nineteenth century.

      In 1888 he published an article on the value of cooperative stores for Ireland.  When he came back to Ireland in 1889 he threw himself into the cooperative movement, which aimed at improving Irish agriculture for small farmers.  By 1891 some eighteen societies had been formed by over a thousand farmers.  From 1894 to 1899 he was president of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, which he founded.  He was appointed to the Congested Districts Board, where he served from 1891 to 1918, and was elected MP for South Dublin in 1892 as a Unionist.  Until 1900 he was a staunch advocate of the claims of Irish agriculture in the British Parliament.

      He was largely responsible for achieving the establishment of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in Ireland.  He employed the poet George Russell to edit the movement's paper, the Irish Homestead, in which JAMES JOYCE'S [25] first stories from Dubliners appeared.

      Plunkett was convinced that the solution to the social and economic problems of rural Ireland depended on a mixture of self-help and state aid, but he had to fight hard for his cause against the lethargy and opposition of vested interests.  Nor did he believe in 'compulsory cooperation' - the Marxist solution.

      The Irish Agricultural Organization Society was one of the most influential agencies in the remaking of modern Ireland, and its influence can still be felt through the giant cooperative dairies which flourish all over Ireland and are now among the biggest businesses in the country.  He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, and was made a knight commander of the Victorian Order in 1903.

      His book, Ireland in the New Century, published in 1904, caused immense controversy, as he claimed that one of the drags on social and economic development in Ireland was the Catholic Church, which stifled any sense of personal enterprise.  This was angrily rebutted by Catholic apologists.  As a Protestant, Plunkett may have exaggerated the power of the church, for later it would be unable to hinder Irish rebels undertaking often radical reforms.  The inertia lay in the poor education and traditionalism of the farmers themselves.

      The controversy may well have damaged Plunkett in the eyes of the rising generation of Irish nationalists.  However, he was a Unionist in politics, and hoped to keep Ireland whole under one government.  He was strongly opposed to the partition of Ireland in 1922.  Like many, he saw the development of Canada and Australia as having relevance to Ireland.  He founded the Irish Dominion League to keep the Irish Free State within the British Commonwealth, but Irish nationalists were intent on full independence.

      He was a senator in the Irish Free State in 1922 and 1923, but republicans burned his house down and he left Ireland in some bitterness to pass the rest of his life in England, where he continued to promote the cooperative movement worldwide.  In 1924 a major conference on agricultural cooperation in the British Empire was held in London, over which he presided.  He visited South Africa in 1925, and in 1927 made a special study of the benefits of cooperation in India.

      In 1919 Plunkett endowed a trust under his name which encouraged the development of agriculture through cooperation.  He published other books, and to the end of his life was active in the causes to which he had devoted himself.  He died in Weybridge, in Surrey, on 26th March 1932.  He never married, but for much of his life retained a strong affection for Daisy Fingal, with whom many thought he was in love.

      Though Plunkett's enthusiasm might not have endeared him to the rich graziers and strong farmers of Ireland, the country, as a whole, has done well due to cooperation.  Some co-ops were tiny operations to begin with.  In the early days, perhaps the most famous co-op was at Templecrone in Donegal, largely the creation of Patrick Gallagher.  But since 1906, when that enterprise was founded, co-ops have grown into immense operations.  Small farmers were able to sell their milk or pigs into the co-op facility, where they could take their share of the profits through a monthly or even weekly cheque.  The co-op cheque became an essential feature of Irish rural life from the 1930s onwards.  The driving force behind the enterprise would often be a local priest, though today the small co-ops have almost disappeared.

      The transformation of Ireland that Plunkett had hoped for has been achieved, and it brought just the social changes he had hoped for.  Horace Plunkett was one of the great men whose services Ireland lost through the narrow sectarian action of political extremists, but his vision has survived all opposition.