Horace Plunkett - Family and Background

Family and Background

Plunkett was the third son of Admiral The 16th Baron of Dunsany, of Dunsany Castle, Dunsany, near Dunshaughlin, County Meath, Ireland, and The Hon. Anne Constance Dutton (d. 1858) (daughter of The 2nd Baron Sherborne). He was Anglo-Irish, being of Protestant Irish unionist background, educated at Eton College and University College, Oxford, of which college he became an honorary fellow in 1909. His older brother was The 17th Baron of Dunsany and his cousin was George, 1st Count Plunkett, a Papal count and father of Joseph Mary Plunkett.

Threatened by lung trouble in 1879, he sought health in ranching for ten years (1879–1889) in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains, United States, where, together with a substantial fortune, he acquired experience that proved invaluable in the work of agricultural education, improvement and development, to which he devoted himself on his return to Ireland on the death of his father in 1889.

Never marrying, his tremendous energy poured into politics, sociology, public administration and economics. As visible testimony to his endeavours, he left the Irish co-operative movement and what is now known as the Republic of Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.