FROM THE ARCHIVES:Arguing for a new co-operative movement in the 1970s, Michael Judge explained why similar efforts earlier in the century had failed. – JOE JOYCE
IT HAS been said that every time you turn a corner in the West of Ireland, you trip across the skeleton of a dead consumer co-op. In one parish after another, the small co-operative unit failed in the harsh economic climate which followed on the period of prosperity engendered by the first World War. The problems of personnel, inventory and cash control – dishonesty, stealing and ignorance – and apathy and disloyalty on the part of the local consumers proved too much . . .
The story of co-operation in so many western communities is the sad story of what might have been. The sacrifices demanded in the building of co-operation were too great for communities with as yet undeveloped social sympathies. The rural people showed little capacity for self-catering as consumers. The village co-op, which mushroomed along with so many others in the West, had but a short duration of life.
In the phase which followed, the traders cashed in on ignorance and disloyalty and waxed fat by exploiting the lack of organisation among rural producers and consumers.
This is how Horace Plunkett saw the situation at the beginning of the century: “You find a desperately poor community, owned body and soul by the local trader, who systematically keeps his customers just up to their necks in debt, and then supplies them with barely enough to keep them alive, taking in exchange everything they have got, from their poultry and eggs to their labour. If you could analyse the system you would find it to compare with that of Shylock.” There was two-way trading between the rural merchants and their farmer customers; farm produce was purchased and provisions sold.
A third dimension was added in that a few teenagers from local farm families were employed as shop assistants or yardsmen, usually at shamefully low wages . . . Before their eyes the co-operative alternative proved itself a failure. A leaderless and unsophisticated peasantry came to accept as friend and benefactor the village merchant who bartered against the produce of the farms provisions for their animals, fertilisers for their fields, the necessities of life for their homes, giving them credit in times of need . . .
The village store carried all the wares a countryman could possibly need: the clothes and heavy boots he wore at work, the tools he wielded in the fields, the utensils his womenfolk used in the home . . . Everything he required for his frugal existence in life could be purchased under one roof: and when life was over the burial requisites which went with his departure were stocked in the village emporium and it was the village merchant who conveyed him to his final resting place . . . Adept at his job, [the village merchant] had a ready handshake, a bluff, hearty approach and a persuasive line in sales talk.
He knew both his merchandise and his customers inside out.