Features
Bobby Burke Remembered
On 13th and 14th October, a well-attended seminar was held in Tuam, Co. Galway to mark the centenary of the birth of Robert Malachy (Bobby) Burke, a remarkable (if now largely forgotten) pioneer of large-scale co-operative farming in Ireland. For the best part of 20 years during the economically and politically difficult 1930s and '40s, Toghermore farm near Tuam, a holding of 250 acres of mixed quality land, was run along co-operative lines.
Practical idealist
Bobby Burke, an unlikely social and political radical in view of his background as a member of a landlord family, came under the influence of Christian Socialist ideas while at school in England in the 1920s. The Christian Socialist influence is not only evident in Bobby Burke's approach to co-operative farming. It also informed his career as a Labour Party activist; he held a seat on Galway County Council for a number of years and stood unsuccessfully for the Dáil a number of times before winning a Senate seat in 1948. Later on Christian Socialist ideals would guide him and his wife Ann when they began new lives as lay missionaries in Africa in the early 1950s.
What Bobby Burke realised early on was that Christian Socialist ideals could only realise their potential for change when put into practice. A formal training in agriculture would help him meet the many challenges of translating his ideals into practice in the farming sphere. The fact that Burke was from a privileged background was in some ways a definite advantage. Apparently £1,000 of his inheritance went on purchasing farming equipment, such as a Fordson tractor and a 120-ton silo, and on other farm improvements.
Mixed farming
The agriculture practiced at Toghermore was based on mixed farming; as well as raising livestock such as cattle, sheep and pigs, a variety of crops were grown. A substantial area - some 80 acres - was under timber. When Roy Johnston visited Toghermore as a student in 1947, he witnessed various organic production practices such as dependence on local feed sources and gardening that relied on manure from the byre.
Building on a dynamic system of farming, the two basic elements of the Toghermore approach to remuneration were to pay higher than average wages and to organise a profit-sharing system. The workforce (as many as ten in 1941) was provided with houses on the farm; workers also consumed some of the food they had laboured to produce. Leisure time was highly valued and it was a consideration in introducing labour-saving machinery. We know that Burke, certainly before his years in the Senate, threw himself fully into the farm work.
Co-operative advantage
The most detailed contemporary account of Toghermore farm suggests that the co-operative principle of co-management was taken very seriously. This is not to say that there were not difficulties. Differences of opinion did occur, though Burke could tell his Senate colleagues in 1950 that 'everything is settled by majority vote, and the workers accept the majority ruling'.
Toghermore co-operative farm was never an end in itself for Bobby Burke. His early acceptance of the argument that large-scale co-operatively organised farming had real social and economic advantages over small-scale family farming meant that Toghermore would always have to function as a model farm. To be taken seriously, it was vital that the farm be considered an agricultural and commercial success. Speaking in 1941, Burke claimed that since co-operative activity had commenced an increase of 'at least ten per cent' had been achieved in efficiency.
Against the tide
What prevented Bobby Burke and his co-operative venture being a greater force for change in rural Ireland? Here we can point to difficulties relating to Bobby Burke and to Toghermore as well as to difficulties relating to the wider political and social climate. Largely for personal reasons the Burkes would leave Ireland in 1951. In Burke's absence the co-operative farm did not survive; indeed it seems to have been partly disintegrating during his years in the Senate. What is also clear is that the wider social and political climate in Ireland for co-operation of the type Burke was advocating was highly unsympathetic. He therefore found himself out of kilter with state policy and with many influential strands of public opinion. Radical conceptions of equality, community and participation of the type being promoted by Burke via co-operation found little or no appeal among the more powerful groups in post-independence Ireland.
If anyone is to be regarded as a force for tolerance and democratisation in the rural Ireland of the 1930s and '40s then Bobby Burke surely merits consideration. His Christian Socialism informed his life in public (as a politician), in the civic sphere (as a community activist in Tuam) and in the local economy (through co-operative farming). His activist period in Ireland may have been relatively short, but it was (and remains) quite exceptional.
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