Plunkett, Sir Horace Curzon

Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett, (born Dec. 24, 1854, Sherborne, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died March 26, 1932, Weybridge, Surrey), pioneer of Irish agricultural cooperation who strongly influenced the rise of the agricultural cooperative movement in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

Plunkett, whose father was a baron in the Irish peerage and whose family seat was at Dunsany, County Meath, was educated in England. He went to the United States in 1879 and spent 10 years as a cattle rancher in Wyoming. He returned to Ireland in 1889 and devoted himself to the agricultural cooperative movement, first organizing creameries and then, in 1894, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, a forerunner of similar societies in England, Wales, and Scotland. A moderate Unionist member of Parliament for South County Dublin from 1892 to 1900, he became vice president (1899–1907) of the new Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland, which he had been instrumental in creating.

His later experience convinced him of the need for the independence of an Ireland without partition inside the Commonwealth, and he fought strongly for this goal, as chairman of the Irish Convention (1917–18) and, in 1919, as founder of the Irish Dominion League and of the Plunkett Foundation for Cooperative Studies, an agricultural research and information centre. He was appointed to the first Senate of the Irish Free State (1922–23). His house in Dublin was bombed and burned during in the civil war, and he lived in England thereafter. In 1924 the Plunkett Foundation also moved to England.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1902 and Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1903. His writings include Ireland in the New Century (1904) and The Rural Life Problem of the United States (1910).