Irish Agricultural Organisation Society
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Agricultural cooperative Producer cooperative |
|
| Industry | Agriculture, home industry |
| Successor | Irish Co-operative Organisation Society |
| Founded | 1894 |
| Headquarters | 84 Merrion Square, Dublin, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
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Area served
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Ireland |
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Key people
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Sir Horace Plunkett (Founder) Lord Monteagle (President) Thomas A. Finlay (Vice-President) Robert A. Anderson (Secretary) George William Russell (Assistant Secretary) PJ Hannon (Assistant Secretary) |
| Services | Farming advice, business expertise and financial assistance |
| Members | Over 100,000 in 1914 |
The Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) was an agricultural association in Ireland which advocated, and helped to organise, agricultural cooperativism. From its establishment in 1894, it quickly became an important element of the Irish economy and laid the foundations of the successful Irish dairy industry. Although officially nonpolitical, the IAOS became associated with the Irish Home Rule movement and Irish nationalist activity from its inception. It was later reorganised and renamed as the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society Limited, a body which continues to operate in the Republic of Ireland.
The Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) was founded in 1894 by Sir Horace Plunkett, an Anglo-Irish politician with a keen interest in agriculture and rural affairs. He had established a cooperative on his family estate as early as 1878. Other key figures involved in setting up the IAOS included Plunkett's personal friends Thomas A. Finlay and Thomas Spring Rice, 2nd Baron Monteagle of Brandon, whose Mount Trenchard House home provided an early venue for meetings. Plunkett and the other founders were motivated by a desire to "regenerate" Irish farmers materially and morally. Plunkett had witnessed at firsthand the success of agricultural cooperatives in the United States of America, and desired to establish a more productive business-like approach to farming in Ireland, taking account of Scandinavian models of co-operation. In addition, he saw cooperativism as an answer to the growing conflict between Roman Catholic and Protestant rural communities. As Plunkett recalled in his 1908 pamphlet The Rural Life Problem of the United States:
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