Horace Plunkett - Success and Opposition

Success and Opposition

Expressed public opinion, initially lukewarm, grew hostile as the movement developed and shopkeepers, butter-buyers and sections of the press led a campaign of virulent opposition. Co-operatives and Plunkett were denounced as ruining the dairy industry. But the movement caught hold and with his colleague George William Russell (AE), Plunkett made a good working team, writing widely on economic and cultural development and the role of labour. As early as 1894, when his campaign reached a stage too big to be directed by a few individuals, Plunkett founded the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), which rapidly became the powerhouse of co-operation, with 33 affiliated dairy co-operative societies and co-operative banks, introducing co-operation among Irish farmers by proving the benefits obtainable through more economical and efficient management, publishing the following year its journal The Irish Homestead, to disperse information on farming generally. 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.

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 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.