Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett (24 October 1854 – 26 March 1932), was an Anglo-Irish agricultural reformer, pioneer of agricultural cooperatives and author. In politics, he had been elected as a Unionist MP, but later became a supporter of a form of Home Rule and served for a year as a senator in the Irish Free State.
Plunkett, a younger brother of John Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany, was a member of the Congested Districts Board for Ireland for over 27 years, founder of the Recess Committee and the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), vice-president (operational head) of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) for Ireland (predecessor to the Department of Agriculture) from October 1899 to May 1907, Unionist MP for South Dublin in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1892 to 1900, and Chairman of the Irish Convention of 1917–18.Thom's Directory 1928. In 1919 he founded the Irish Dominion League, aiming to keep Ireland united. In 1922 he became a member of the first formation of Seanad Éireann, the upper chamber in the Parliament of the new Irish Free State. He has been described as a Christian socialist.
Family and background Plunkett was born in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, England, the third son of Admiral Edward Plunkett, the 16th Baron of Dunsany, of Dunsany Castle, Dunsany, near Dunshaughlin, County Meath, and the Honourable Anne Constance Dutton (d. 1858; daughter of John Dutton, 2nd Baron Sherborne). Raised in County Meath, Plunkett was Anglo-Irish, being of a Church of Ireland and unionist background, educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford, of which he became an honorary fellow in 1909.
His older brother was John Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany and a distant cousin was George Noble Plunkett, a Catholic, a Papal Count and father of Joseph Plunkett, one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and a leader of the Easter Rising of 1916.
Threatened by lung trouble in 1879, Horace Plunkett sought health in ranching for ten years (1879–1889) in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, where he acquired, together with a substantial fortune, extensive agricultural and business experience that proved invaluable in the work of agricultural education, improvement and development. On visits back to Ireland, and for much of the time when he returned, he devoted himself to these topics.
He devoted his career to agricultural and rural development, as well as to politics, diplomacy, public administration, and economics. He played a central role in the development of the Irish cooperative movement, which later included large creamery and food ingredient enterprises such as Avonmore and Kerry Group. He was also the prime driver in the establishment of the first government department for agriculture in Ireland, and founded the Plunkett Foundation. His work also influenced the formation of organisations including the Irish Countrywomen's Association and the Women's Institutes in the United Kingdom.
Career Early political career Although a Unionist, Plunkett resolved to bring together people of all political views for the promotion of the material prosperity of the Irish people. In 1891 he was appointed to the newly established Congested Districts Board and learned at first-hand about the wretched conditions of the rural population, especially west of the River Shannon. The experience hardened his conviction that the one remedy for social and economic ills was cooperative self-help. The Congested Districts Board were a major plank of the ultimately failed Conservative policy of Constructive Unionism or "killing Home Rule with kindness".
Around him, he saw a troubled economy, racked with dissension, denuded by emigration, impoverished in its countryside and economically stagnant in its towns.Byrne, J.J.: AE and Sir Horace Plunkett, pp. 152–54: (The Shaping of Modern Ireland Conor-Cruise O'Brien, 1960).
Before going to America he had become an enthusiast for the Rochdale principles of Consumer cooperatives and in 1878 had set a store up on the family estate.
Agricultural reform Plunkett took a leading part in developing agricultural co-operation in Ireland, of which he had learned from isolated American farmers, taking account of Scandinavian models of cooperation and the invention of the steam-powered cream separator. Working with a few colleagues, including two members of the clergy, and advocating self-reliance, he set his ideas into practice first among dairy farmers in the south of Ireland, who established Ireland's first cooperative at Doneraile, County Cork. He also opened the first creamery in Dromcollogher, County Limerick, now the site of the National Dairy Cooperative Museum.
In the setting up of creameries, the cooperative movement experienced its greatest success. Plunkett got farmers to join to establish units to process and market their own butter, milk and cheese to standards suitable for the profitable British market, rather than producing unhygienic, poor-quality output in their homes for local traders. This enabled farmers to deal directly with companies established by themselves, which guaranteed fair prices without middlemen absorbing the profits.
Work with Roosevelt Plunkett believed that the Industrial Revolution needed to be redressed by an agricultural revolution through cooperation, and proclaimed his ideals under the slogan "Better farming, better business, better living". (US president Theodore Roosevelt adopted the slogan for his conservation and country life policy.)
Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of the Bureau of Forestry introduced Plunkett to Roosevelt in 1906. Roosevelt had recently set up the National Conservation Commission and was also interested in Irish cooperatives. Arguing that it was not enough to conserve natural resources without tackling the problems of rural life, Plunkett and Pinchot helped draft Roosevelt's letter recommending the Commission on Country Life's report to congress. The Dictionary of Irish Biography credits Plunket with persuading Roosevelt to establish the commission as a complement to the conservation work.
Success and opposition Public opinion, initially lukewarm, grew hostile in some sectors as the cooperative movement developed, and shopkeepers, butter-buyers and sections of the press led a campaign of virulent opposition. Cooperatives and Plunkett were denounced for supposedly ruining the dairy industry but the movement caught hold, with the mass of farmers benefitting. Plunkett and his colleagues including the poet and painter George William Russell ("Æ") made a good working team, writing widely on economic and cultural development, and on the role of labour.
As early as 1894, when his campaign reached a size too big to be directed by a few individuals, Plunkett founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), with Lord Monteagle, Thomas A. FinlayIreland in the New Century, Chapt.7 and others. Robert A. Anderson acted as secretary, with Æ and PJ Hannon his assistants. IAOS soon became the powerhouse of cooperation, with 33 affiliated dairy cooperative societies and cooperative banks, introducing cooperation among Irish farmers by proving the benefits obtainable through more economical and efficient management. The following year he and Russell began publishing its journal The Irish Homestead to spread information on farming. Four years later there were 243 affiliated societies. Within a decade, 800 societies were in existence, with a trade turnover of three million pounds sterling (over 300 million sterling in today's money, and the turnover of the resulting companies is in excess of a billion euro).
Plunkett's task was frustrating. He was a pioneer of the concept of systematic rural development, who, in spite of his role in Irish affairs being often overlooked, influenced many international reformers, and can be credited as one of the few who had a long-term vision for the development of rural Ireland. He was apt to remind audiences that, even if full peasant proprietorship was achieved and Home Rule was implemented, rural underdevelopment would still have to be faced. But class conflict between farmers and shopkeepers intervened to frustrate much of what he aimed to do.
MP for South Dublin Before entering Parliament, Plunkett had been involved in the Unionist reaction to the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule, predicting in a speech to an 1886 Unionist demonstration that Home rule would lead to "squalid poverty and violent social disorder, which before long is almost certain to end in civil war".The Times, 15 October 1886, quoted in footnote 18, page 6, The Conservatives and the Redefinition of Unionism, 1912-21, Stephen Evans, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 9, No 1, 1998, Oxford University Press
At the 1892 general election he was elected as the Irish Unionist Alliance Member of Parliament (MP) for South Dublin, gaining it from the Anti-Parnellite incumbent Sir Thomas Esmonde against a split nationalist vote. He successfully held the seat against a sole nationalist (Parnellite Nationalist) challenger Edmund Haviland-Burke in 1895.
Early in his career, Plunkett opposed home rule because of the danger of partition. In 1893 he asserted that one of the leading objections to any measure of home rule was that if it were possible to enforce it on Ulster "... it would intensify and perpetuate a state of things in which the Boyne seemed to be broader, deeper and stormier than the Irish Sea".
At the 1900, F. Elrington Ball stood as an independent Unionist candidate against Plunkett's conciliatory approach. This split the unionist vote, and Plunkett was defeated by John Mooney of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
Expanding cooperation
Continuing his policy of conciliation, Plunkett suggested in a letter to the Irish press in August 1895 that a few prominent persons of various political opinions, both nationalist and unionist, should meet to discuss and frame a scheme of practical legislation for pursuing national development, and to make recommendations on the Agriculture and Industries (Ireland) Bill of 1897.
The outcome of this proposal was the formation of the Recess Committee, with Plunkett as chairman and members of divergent views, such as the Earl of Mayo, John Redmond, The O'Conor Don, Thomas Sinclair, Thomas Spring Rice, Rev Dr Kane (Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen), Father Thomas A. Finlay, Mr John Ross, MP, Timothy Harrington MP, Sir John Arnott, Sir William Ewart, Sir Daniel Dixon (after Lord Mayor of Belfast), Sir James Musgrave (Chairman of the Belfast Harbour Board), Thomas Andrews (Chairman of the Belfast and County Down Railway). T. P. Gill acted as Honorary Secretary to the committee.Ireland in the New Century, Chapt.8
In July 1896, the Recess Committee issued a report, of which Plunkett was the author, containing accounts of the systems of state aid to agriculture and technical instruction in foreign countries. This report, and the growing influence of Plunkett, who became a member of the Irish Privy Council in 1897, led to the passing in 1899 of an Act establishing the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) for Ireland, of which the Chief Secretary for Ireland was to be President . Plunkett was appointed vice-president, a position of de facto leadership.Maume, Patrick: The Long Gestation, Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 p.18, Gill & Macmillan (1999) He guided the policy and administration of the DATI in its first seven critical years.
The DATI worked: to improve the quality of crops and livestock to deal with animal and plant disease to encourage fishing and planting of forests to collect statistics on many aspects of Irish life.