Dr. Henry Kennedy

Dr. Henry Kennedy

Born in the tiny village of Toor in North Tipperary Dr. Kennedy has been lauded as a “visionary” in the development of agriculture for the benefit of farming families in Ireland. Dr Kennedy was head of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) for almost four decades (1926-63) – the longest serving chief executive in its 130-year history. His first role in 1920 was chief executive officer of the Irish White cross Society where he reported directly to Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith. He is credited with having inspired the establishment of the Dairy Disposal Company for the state to take over local ailing creameries and setting up the Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC) to provide farm finance. It helped that his brother-in-law, Patrick Hogan, the country’s first Minister of Agriculture – was in Government at the time. According to Michael Berkery, Dr Kennedy “had the ability and the capacity to get local groups to buy into his ideas that ultimately led to the development of the dairy industry that we have today because he was a leader of exceptional ability and yet a very humble man who always described himself as a mountainy man”. Dr. Kennedy’s address to the Social Order Summer School in 1938 displays his advanced thinking on farming and the critical role of grass in increasing Irish agricultural output and farm incomes.