Horace Plunkett - Recognition Abroad

Recognition Abroad

In the troubled years preceding 1922, the co-operative movement suffered much injury at the hands of British government forces, the creameries alleged to be centres of sedition. Factories were wrecked or burned, stocks destroyed, trade interrupted. Plunkett’s protests went unheeded, demands for compensation rejected. After the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he accepted membership in 1922 of the new Irish Free State Senate, Seanad Éireann. His work on co-operation took him abroad frequently, and when he was in the United States during the Irish Civil War in 1923, his grand house Kilteragh, in Foxrock, Co. Dublin was one of over 300 country houses targeted by the IRA and burned down during the Civil War, the fire taking with it many of the records of the wider Plunkett family, which he had gathered to prepare a work on the subject.