[Sir] Horace Plunkett (1854-1932)

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Commentary
George (“AE”) Russell, letter to Katharine Tynan Hinkson, 19 Dec. 1901: ‘[H]e [Plunkett] wrote to me before the Whitseumtide Recess that he would like to go round among the farmers with me a do what [36] he could to aid in the work of organisation and to hearten up the congests. The average M.P. spends his holiday yachting but Plunkett went through Connemara, Achill Enis and part of Donegal with me day after day speaking to the farmers, going into their houses, trying to inspire them with the idea of self help and of cooperating together. I never knew a man so unwearied in helping others. No trouble was too great to undertake on their behalf. He is never downcast, his optimism is incurable. His belief in the capacity of Irishmen to elevate their country and their own condition is at least as great as that of the most unsubduable intransigente. He has achieved success because he never gives up an idea of which he is convinced of the truth. He had fifty unsuccessful meetings before he could get the first farmer’s creamery started. Fifty meetings without result! I think most of us would be ashamed to face an audience after two dozen unsuccessful attempts to get a hearing. He is not naturally a fluent speaker but has by practise, and because he has something to say, developed into a really fine speaker with moments of passion and emotional depth. You always feel the sincerity of his speech. You always say “This man believes what he is saying.” He has plenty of humour, and it never hurts. I never heard him say a nasty thing of his bitterest political opponent. At Galway where sixteen of our M.Ps slated him from morn to night as a place hunter, a dishonest politician, he never retorted by counter accusations. He always spoke of them with the greatest courtesy. “I have no word to say against men who for generations have clung to a cause they believe to be true and for which they have sacrificed so much.” His hits are general and not personal but they are hits for all that. He said of the Orangemen who opposed him “They talk of lining the last ditch: myself I am of opinion they would be found climbing the first fence.” While he is a Protestant by birth he has always worked without a trace of sectarian feeling with the most extreme Catholics. I don,t believe he ever asks himself what a man’s religion or politics are so long as he works for Ireland. He said a few weeks ago in Belfast at a public meeting where he tried to melt the obdurate sectarianism by a little humour. “We all know that those who differ from us on matters of religion will be adequately punished hereafter. So why harbour bad feeling now?” In all the work he has undertaken there is the same spirit forgetful and reconciling. The Organisation Society of which he was founder and president for five years gathered into its work the extremists of both sides and the societies are filled with Orangemen in the north and with United Irish Leaguers in the west, and no political or religious questions are ever raised in the industrial work which it is agreed [can] be carried on amicably. A few years ago Plunkett went to a northern meeting with Father Finlay to start a creamery. They were met by the Orange band with orange sashes and the Nationalist band with green sashes who gave them a hearty welcome, and by mutual agreement each side left out the more provocative items in their programme “Boyne Water” &c. &c. The Recess Committee was founded in the same spirit, and Nationalist M.Ps met with Unionists from Belfast at their meetings to take council on the economic condition of Ireland. [...]’ (In Letters from AE, ed. Alan Denson, London: Abelard-Schuman 1961, p.36-38.)

James Connolly, The Reconquest of Ireland (1915; rep. in Labour in Ireland, 1917) - Chap. VIII: “Labour and Co-operation in Ireland”: ‘[...W]hen the modern co-operative movement was preached to the Irish farmers by the lecturers of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, when the literature prepared by Mr. George Russell, Father Finlay, S.J., Sir Horace Plunkett, and their fellow-labourers, was being pushed throughout Ireland, it was early discovered that their attempts to regenerate Irish agricultural life had no more bitter enemies than the political representatives of the Irish people, irrespective of their political colour. / The Unionist politicians opposed the co-operators because the movement tended to bring together Protestant and Catholic on a basis of friendly and fraternal helpfulness - a state of things that, if persisted in, would inevitably destroy that bigoted distrust and hatred upon which Unionism depended for its existence. / The Home Rulers opposed the co-operators upon the alleged grounds that their success in increasing the finances of the farmers would only redound to the advantage of the landlord, but really because the practice of co-operation would necessarily interfere with the profits of those leeches who, as gombeen men, middlemen and dealers of one kind or another in the small country towns, sucked the life-blood of the agricultural population around them.’ (1917 edn., p.255; see further under George [“Æ”] Russell, infra.)

D. D. Sheehan, Ireland Since Parnell (1921), [Chap. VII] “Forces of Regeneration and Their Effect”: ‘Economic reform should proceed first on educational lines before it could be hoped to establish new industries with any hope of success. The pioneer in this work was the Hon. (now Sir) Horace Plunkett who returned to Ireland after some ranching experiences in the United States and set himself the task of effecting the economic regeneration of rural Ireland by preaching the gospel of self-help and co-operation. It is no part of my purpose to inquire into the secret motives of Sir Horace Plunkett, if he ever had any, or to allege, as a certain writer (M. Paul Dubois) has done, that Sir Horace promoted the movement for economic reform in the hope of reconciling Ireland to the Union and to Imperialism. I may lament it, as I do, that Sir Horace, who now believes himself to be the discoverer of Dominion Home Rule, did not raise his voice either for the Agrarian Settlement or for Home Rule during all the years while he was a real power in the country. I am not however going to allow my views on these questions to deflect my judgment from the real merit of the work performed by Sir Horace and his associates in the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, which in the teeth of considerable difficulties and obstacles succeeded in propagating through Ireland the principles of self-help and co-operation. / From the first, the Society had many and powerful enemies, most of the opposition springing from interested and malevolent parties. [...]’ (Access full-text via Sheehan, q.v.)

Elizabeth Burke [Countess Fingall], Seventy Years Young, with Pamela Hinkson [1937] (Dublin: Lilliput 1991): ‘Horace Plunkett had almost the reputation of Mr. Parnell before he alienated the Church Hierarchy by deprecating the large sums of money spent in building churches’ - from Ireland in the New Century, by Geoffrey Drage, written at Killeen [...] one Bishop who had never read the book, described it as an “ignorant little almanack” [...] I disagreed with him about the church building. For, I said, the poor people had so little beauty and colour in their lives. And the churches, with their brilliant, often crudely coloured Stations and Saints, and the vestments and flowers and incense, supplied their need of colour and beauty. Whatever we might feel, the churches were beautiful for the majority of the people for whom they were built. And that Refuge, with all that it means to the Faith of the Irish poor, gave them what they wanted, and made their lives bearable. (p.329.) Note also IAOS slogan: ‘Better farming, better business, better living.’ (p.346.) Plunkett was of the Protestant branch of the Meath family to which Lord Fingall - called ‘the Somnolent Earl’ - belonged.

Conrad M. Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study (London: Macmillan 1937): ‘That to which the countryman is attached is a social order, as Sir Horace Plunkett alone among the commentators on the Irish scene could see. And a social order is an active living growth whose embrace soon gathers in the whole of life.’ (p.145.)

Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences (London: Robert Hale 1947), characterises Plunkett as ‘striving to remove the middleman, the “gombeen man”, who in every village was the purveyor of seeds and agricultural implements and everything else, and who advanced money, often at extortionate interest, to the farmers in anticipation of their crops, and in his efforts to set up co-operative creameries and to promote the general principle of co-operative purchase, he came up against the Nationalist Party. For certain of the Nationalist members were themselves “gombeen” men, and these men were often the Party bosses all over the country.’ (p.52; with ensuing account of the Dept. of Agriculture and Technical Instruction and withdrawal of funding from same by T. W. Russell). Commenting on Plunkett’s adoption of the Dominion Home Rule idea, Headlam remarks, ‘The weakness of Plunkett and those whom he ahd gathered around him was that they were “decent people”, and that they entirely underestimated the determination of Sinn Féin’ (p.193.)

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Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland: The Stopford Connection (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985), notes that Plunkett coined the saying ‘Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember and for Irishmen to forget’ (in Ireland in the New Century; also cited in Cormac Ó Grada, Ireland: A New Economic History, Clarendon Press 1994, p.176.). Further, ‘,He pleaded for a reconsideration of the Irish Question not in political but in economic terms and moral terms, economic grievances to be dealt with by the acquisition of skills, technical knowledge, organisation and business experience, in the era of the practical which had dawned; Ireland needed to be reformed from within; spoke of the weakness of the Irish character, and the lack of moral courage which made leadership easy but was also “the quicksand of Irish life”; a lack of serious thought in public questions, a listlessness and apathy amounting to fatalism; he surveyed political parties, the Church and the Gaelic movement critically; sponsored a dinner in 1899 to promote co-operation between “the practical men and the dreamers”’ [i.e. Yeats et al.]. Plunkett he spoke at an American banquet of Ireland as ‘an English-speaking community’ (Ó Bróin, 1985, p.31]. Further, Ó Bróin quotes extensively from Plunkett’s diary in 1916, cited in Margaret Digby, op. cit.: ‘I learned that there was no “Rising” elsewhere than in Dublin, that the rebellion was organised and led by Sir Roger Casement, whom the Government had captured. I had gone to [Dublin Castle] to get a cipher telegram through to Arthur Balfour, the first Lord of the Admiralty, telling him I thought it important to let the American people know of the German origin of the Irish trouble. I changed my cable to definite advice to give the capture of Casement as a piece of “exclusive news” to the America press representatives so as to ensure their co-operation.’ [Easter Monday, a ‘black day, a dies irae’] (O Bróin, p.97.) Quoted from Margaret Digby (1949), pp.209-11. See also index refs.: on Gaelic league, 12, 107; on agricultural ideas; Ireland in the New Century, 31 [as supra]; on the Irish literary movement, 32; views on the Rising, 96-7 [as supra]; organises Food Committee, 104; proposals on Home Rule, 112; at Casement’s trial, 134; presides over Irish Convention, 149; house destroyed by anti-Treatyites, 194.

Liam Kennedy, ‘The Union of Ireland and Britain, 1801-1921’, in Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (IIS/QUB 1996), quotes: ‘Roman Catholicism strikes an outsider as being in some of its tendencies noneconomic, if not actually anti-economic. […] I am simply adverting to what has appeared to me, in the course of my experience in Ireland, to be a defect in the industrial character of Roman Catholics which, however caused, seems to me to have been intensified by their religion. The reliance of that religion on authority, its repression of individuality, and its complete shifting of what I may call the moral centre of gravity to a future existence - to mention no other characteristics - appear to me calculated, unless supplemented by other influences, to check the growth of the qualities of initiative and self-reliance, especially amongst a people whose lack of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its paramount virtue.’ (Ireland, pp.101-02 ); Kennedy comments, Needless to say, Plunkett’s strictures drew the full wrath of a church hyper-sensitive to critical comment. Soon after its appearance, Ireland in the new century was accorded the distinction of a special pastoral denunciation by the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Logue. (Freman’s Journal, 7 March, 1904). The Rev. M. O’Riordan reviewed it unfavourably in the Dublin paper, The Leader, during the course of a year, his literary exertions later emerging in book form as Catholicity and progress in Ireland. (Catholicity and Progress, 1906). Plunkett, in an epilogue to a cheap edition of his book in 1905, commented with a touch of humour that “a review is usually a chapter about a book”, but in this case it “assumes the Proportions of a book about a chapter” (Ireland in the New Century, pop. edn., 1906, p.317; Kennedy, p.104.) See also ‘The early response of the Irish Catholic Clergy to the co-operative movement’, in Kennedy, op. cit., pp.117-34.

Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge UP 1996) [quotes Plunkett on feminine Irish, as infra]: ‘For Horace Plunkett, the impression that the Irish are womanly charts the colonized subject’s debilitating internalization of an imperial stereotype. Plunkett was a pioneer of Irish agricultural reform, a unionist MP for Dublin, and, later, a Free State senator. Like Matthew Arnold, he combined an enthusiasm for the virtues of Celts with a firm unionism. His comment invokes the common confluence of race and gender in imperialist discourses that equates femininity with racial inferiority and political subordination. Plunkett assumed this equation rather than questioning it, and his masculinism was widely shared among British imperialists and Irish nationalists alike. A major strand of British imperialist discourse labelled the Irish feminine and therefore inferior, dependent and weak; nationalists often disavowed femininity and asserted a compensatory and exaggerated masculinity. What is at stake, of course, is not “femininity itself”, but the ubiquity and tenacious force of the linkages between femininity, racial or national character, and colonial status. [... &c.]’ (p.16-17.)

R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000 (London: Allen Lane: 2007) - Chap., ‘How the Catholics Became Protestants’: ‘The notion of Catholicism as indivisible from Irish nationalism and even from irish identity might be counted as one of the casualties of the last thirty years’ cultural upheaval. this sails dangerously near the stormy seas where Horace Plunkett found himself when he launched his book Ireland in the New Century in 1904, controversially arguing that the Irish Catholic world-view and ethos retarded economic progress. His analysis is not so far from the kind of ideas floated by Tom Inglis eighty-odd years later in Moral Monopoly, where he relates the forms and practices of Irish society up to the late twentieth-century to the images, ideals and dictates of the Catholic Church with regard to occupational structures, the organization and differentiation of social space, even the expression of emotions.’ (p.37; citing Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly; The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland [2nd edn. 1998], pp.248-9, 253, 255, &c.)

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Quotations

National life: ‘[…] as one who has chosen the humber service of promoting the development of material resources, I am always glasd to emphasise the paramount importance form a purely economic standpoint of simultaneously developing our national life in the higher reginos of lliterature and art. [… &c.] (Plunkett’s letter of apology read at the Shelbourne dinner he himself sponsored for the Literary Theatre; printed in Daily Express, 13 May, 1899; cited in P. J. Mathews, ‘The Irish Revival: A Reappraisal’, in Mathews, ed., New Voices in Irish Criticism, Four Courts 2000, pp.12-19; p.18.)

Feminine Irish: ‘That Ireland, more than any other country, is spoken of as a woman is probably due to hte appearance in our national affairs of qualities which men call womanly. And this impression is not merely te cheap attribution of racial inferiority by the alien critic with which we are familiar, it is our feeling about ourselves.’ (The United Irishwomen: Their Place, Work, and Ideals, Dublin, 1911, rep. in And See Her Beauy Shining There: The Story of the Irish Countrywomen, ed. Pat Bolger, Dublin: IAP 1986; quoted in Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness, Cambridge UP 1996, p.16 [chap. epigraph; and see Howe’s remarks - as supra].)

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References
Brian Cleeve & Ann Brady, A Dictionary of Irish Writers (Dublin: Lilliput 1985), lists only The Rural Life Problem of the U.S. (1910) and Ireland in the New Century (1904, rep. 1982). SEE also Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (1988).

Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives extract from ‘The Gaelic Movement’, in Ireland in the New Century.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), Vol. 2, ref. in Shaw’s O’Flaherty VC: ‘[...] And Sir Horace Plunkett breaking his heart all the time telling them how they might put the land into decent tillage like the French and Belgians’ [511]; numerous things said about him in George Moore’s hearing, whose ‘memory curls and rushes into darkness at the word economics’, however (Hail and Farewell) [544]; references to ‘them co-operatives’ in Lennox Robinson’s Whiteheaded Boy, 646n; Susan Mitchell’s Aids to Immortality, ‘You served the Sassenach/When Plunkett got the sack’; and note, resigned from Recess Comm., 1902 [740]; cited by Frederick Ryan [998]; example of signs of energetic transition [A. Martin, ed.; 1022]; incidental refs. in biogs. of Gerald O’Donovan and Joyce Cary [1218, 1219]; BIOG, see FDA3.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 3, selects Ireland in the New Century, Chap. IV, ‘The Influence of Religion Upon Secular Life in Ireland’ & Chap. VI, ‘Through Thought to Action’ [giving his approbation to the Gaelic League]; REMS & REFS, [treatment of compared with George Birmingham’s, 411]; Birmingham (Irishmen All, 1913), There is the economic gospel of Sir Horace Plunkett, and this, at first sight has much to recommend it. The official Nationalists, the men of a pledge-bound Parliamentary party, hate it heartily. The Irish gentleman hates them, and is therefore predisposed to find some good in anything which they detest. [Yet] where everyone is sick to death of lights of oratory and great sentiments of every kind the cold water of common sense is a singularly attractive thing &c.’ [415-16]; err. for Count Plunkett [546]; AE’s weekly review The Irish Statesman was revived in 1923 after a three year gap by Horace Plunkett and was ed. by AE from that date until 1930 [547n.]; Hubert Butler quotes diary-entries [?from Noblesse Oblige], Plunkett, a sick man kept alive by his burning zeal, had made those long journeys which he records in his diaries, ‘... My thoughts germinate in other brains and when the brains are attached to the proper physique the enthusiasm works.’ (Escape from the Anthill, 1985; here 548, and see note, infra]; ref. in Birmingham biog. [557]; dispute between Sir Horace Plunkett and Father Michael O’Riordan ... the contrasting protestant/catholic versions of the Irish ‘national character’ and its presumed fitness for independence ... in a sense both are right ... the historical importance of their dispute [Deane, ed.; 681-82]; part of a lost generation of potential leaders, incl. the men of 1916 [ibid; 684]; Michael O’Riordan (1857-1919) replies, in Catholicity and Progress in Ireland (1905) [696-702 & passim; see O’Riordan, q.v.]; compared with the more political & socialist Frederick Ryan and grouped by Ryan with Filson Young as not understanding necessity of independence [Deane, ed., 703-05]. BIOG & CRIT [808; as above]

Belfast Linenhall Library holds Noblesse Oblige (1908), Problems of Congestion in Ireland (1907), by H. C. Plunkett.

Kennys Bookshop (2002) lists A Defence Of The Convention (Dublin & London: Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 1917), 13pp.; some foxing, but good [€20.00].

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Notes
Oil portrait by John Butler Yeats [NGI]; Horace Plunkett by F. D. Wood, bronze bust 1923, held in IAOS; see Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits Exhibition (Ulster Mus. 1965); also photo-port. by Lafayette printed in Denis Gwynn, Life of Redmond (1932), p.560 facing.

Literary patron: Plunkett wrote a preface for Shan Bullock’s Sixty Years After, while Bullock dedicated Hetty to ‘that good man’ Sir Horace Plunkett. And NOTE that Léon Ó Bróin, in Protestant Nationalists &c (1985), p.96, draws on the diary of Horace Plunkett for 1916, cited in Digby, op. cit. [for quotation, see infra].

Church funds: J. J. Lee considers he was wrong in regarding the siphoning funds into Church building through donations as a depletion of native capital (see The Modernisation of Ireland, 1973).

Patriot parlour: Hubert Butler , in Notes from the Anthill (Lilliput 1985), Chap. 9 ). , ‘... Plunkett’s house in Foxrock which had been the meeting-place for the Anglo-Irish who were concerned about their “country, was burned to the ground in the civil war, because he had become a Senator”,’ ((See The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, Vol. 3, p.548.)

After the fire: For remarks on Plunkett’s lack of animosity against the Free State after the burning of his house, see tephen Gwynn, q.v.

Tyrolian types: In E. M. Lynch, A Parish Providence: A Country Tale (Dublin: Sealy Bryers & Walker; London: T. Fisher Unwin MDCCCXCIV [1894]), a novel set in the Tyrol and describing the successful economy by which the rural poor maintain their decent existence, the philantrophic Country Doctor of the narrative is explicitly compared with Horace Plunkett and his cooperative movement in [Sir Charles Gavan] Duffy’s introduction (p.xxv.)

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