Co-operative Movement in the 40s

Century of Endeavour

The Co-operative Movement in the 40s

(c)Roy Johnston 2000

During the 1940s JJ was active in the Senate and his main work relevant to this thread was via the Commission on Post-Emergency Agricultural Policy. He lived during the war near Drogheda and farmed 30 acres, employing a man and keeping the books, as his ongoing agricultural economics pilot-project.

The 1943-44 year-book of Agricultural Co-operation, published by the Plunkett Foundation, contains an overview, again by HF Norman, entitled 'Agricultural Co-operation in Ireland'. Unlike the mid-30s overview, there is no direct reference to JJ or his work, so he must by this time have faded from Plunkett House consciousness somewhat.

This review however is significant in that it relates to the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the IAOS, which was registered in 1894. Turnover of affiliated members by this time exceed £300M, and membership, as regards individuals associated with local co-ops, was 100,000.

There is a reference to the need for active managed linking of groups of large and small farms together, as a synergetic whole, a foreshadowing of the concept introduced in the Senate around this time by Richards Orpen, and developed by JJ in his book Irish Agriculture in Transition, published in 1951 based on field work done in the late 40s, with the momentum of his post-Emergency Commission work. Norman mentioned Drinagh co-op, in Co Cork, which was one of the several treated by JJ in his 1951 book, as a potential focus for the development of a pilot version of the Orpen model.

Norman in his paper draws attention to the way in which the movement in Northern Ireland had been undermined by Ministry of Agriculture policy. It is noteworthy that the view from Plunkett House remained 'all-Ireland' despite Partition.

The Consumer Co-op Movement

It is necessary at this point to introduce a nugget of experience from the present writer RJ, who during the late 40s was associated with the 'student left' in TCD (where, incidentally, he was a member of the still persisting DU Co-op Society, where he bought his supplies when living in rooms).

The Promethean Society, the background to which I give in the 'left-wing political' stream, had co-operated with the rump of the old pre-war Communist Party, and the politicised ex-IRA internees from the Curragh, to found in 1948 the Irish Workers League, as a sort of pre-political lobby or pressure-group, aimed at radicalising the labour movement by a process of fermenting of ideas.

Working-class housing estates had begin to proliferate on the fringe of Dublin; the main pre-war ones, initiated under the Fianna Fail government, had been Kimmage, Crumlin and Cabra; the first major post-war one was Ballyfermot, to the west of the city, past Inchicore; it was known colloquially at the time as 'Ballyfarout'. There were masses of houses and no shops or amenities, and an obvious opportunity for the consumer co-op principle. Workers League enthusiasts had been to Belfast and seen the Belfast Co-op, so they set about starting one.

The Ballyfermot Co-op did business for a while, but then the word was put around by the gombeen-clerical rumour machine that this was a Communist plot to subvert the moral fibre of the Catholic workers of Ballyfermot; the project was 'read off the pulpit', physically wrecked, leading members were witch-hunted, so that it went out of business.

The 40s and 50s in Ireland were not a friendly environment to initiatives favouring economic democracy. Anyone taking independent initiatives was perceived as a subversive and usually forced into emigration.

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