pioneer of Irish agricultural cooperation who strongly influenced the rise of the agricultural cooperative movement in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

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 Unionist member of Parliament for South County Dublin from 1892 to 1900, he became president in 1899 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, although from 1922 to 1923 he was a senator of the Irish Free State. In 1919, in London, he endowed a trust, now the Plunkett Foundation for Cooperative Studies, as a commonwealth agricultural research and information centre. 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).