to encompass vast creamery and food ingredient businesses such as Avonmore and Kerry Group, what is now Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Plunkett Foundation and to some extent both the Irish Countrywomen's Association and the Women's Institutes of the UK. Career Early political career Although a Unionist, Plunkett resolved to bring together people of all political views for the promotion of the material prosperity of the Irish people. In 1891 he was appointed to the newly established Congested Districts Board and learned at first-hand about the wretched conditions of the rural population, especially west of the River Shannon. The experience hardened his conviction that the one remedy for social and economic ills was cooperative self-help. The Congested Districts Board were a major plank of the ultimately failed Conservative policy of Constructive Unionism or "killing Home Rule with kindness". Around him, he saw a troubled economy, racked with dissension, denuded by emigration, impoverished in its countryside and economically stagnant in its towns. Before going to America he had become an enthusiast for the Rochdale principles of Consumer cooperatives and in 1878 had set a store up on the family estate. Agricultural reform Plunkett took a leading part in developing agricultural co-operation in Ireland, of which he had learned from isolated American farmers, taking account of Scandinavian models of cooperation and the invention of the steam-powered cream separator. Working with a few colleagues, including two members of the clergy, and advocating self-reliance, he set his ideas into practice first among dairy farmers in the south of Ireland, who established Ireland's first cooperative at Doneraile, County Cork. He also opened the first creamery in Dromcollogher, County Limerick, now the site of the National Dairy Cooperative Museum. In the setting up of creameries, the cooperative movement experienced its greatest success. Plunkett got farmers to join to establish units to process and market their own butter, milk and cheese to standards suitable for the profitable British market, rather than producing unhygienic, poor-quality output in their homes for local traders. This enabled farmers to deal directly with companies established by themselves, which guaranteed fair prices without middlemen absorbing the profits. Work with Roosevelt Plunkett believed that the Industrial Revolution needed to be redressed by an agricultural revolution through cooperation, and proclaimed his ideals under the slogan "Better farming, better business, better living". (US president Theodore Roosevelt adopted the slogan for his conservation