The DU Co-op
The DU Co-operative Society came into existence in 1913 and my father had a hand in its foundation, acting as Secretary during its first decade or so, and later for a time as Chairman. It supplied the students living in rooms with their basic needs for many decades, and from the 20s up to the 60s ran a lunchtime buffet in the Dining Hall.
By the 70s however it has become an anachronism. If it were to upgrade itself to modern retailing standards, it would have required substantial capital investment. The procedure for keeping track of member purchases in books was cumbersome. It was difficult to recruit and maintain staff to service the required opening hours. On top of all this, the Students Union, which had expanded with the quasi-political wave of the 1960s, and was making money in the travel business, decided to go into retail trade, in competition with the Co-op, which was perceived as being part of the 'old Establishment'. These factors all added up to a death sentence.
I am indebted to Jennifer Gill, in the College Buildings Office, for the foregoing; she had been at the time a member of the Committee. She added that the actual closure procedure was somewhat complicated, as it involved contacting all shareholders, many generations of students who had some and gone, and getting their written permission to wind it up. This was apparently necessary under the regulations of the Registrar of Friendly Societies. This process was in the end completed, and the residual capital, which amounted to some thousands of pounds, was donated to the College creche.
Thus ended an attempt to implement principles of democratic control over the retail trade which had been rooted in the ideals of Sir Horace Plunkett and George Russell in the 1900s. This failure deserves analysis, and I have attempted this in my concluding chapter.
TCD Applied Research and the Co-ops
This work was done initially as from the Statistical and Operations Research Laboratory, and then later as from the Applied Research Consultancy Group. The co-ops concerned were Lough Egish (bulk milk collection), Mitchelstown and Waterford (milk yield recording), and Bunclody (flax production). There was also some work done on the evaluation of the economics of winter milk production; but this was for Bord Bainne. Some of these projects are mentioned in the techno-economic channel, where there is a supportive hotlink to a chapter in Julian Mac Airt's book on Operations Research in Ireland.
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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999