ABSTRACT
[Robert Owen spent most of the years 1822 and 1823 touring Ireland, repeatedly urging local authorities to adopt his New Lanark-inspired “Plan” for the “Villages of Co-operation” in a bid to solve the country’s socio-economic crisis (Owen 1857, 183; Siméon 2017, 110). Though his “new views” failed to make significant inroads, Owen nevertheless attracted support from a handful of Irish improving landowners, including William Thompson and John Scott Vandeleur, a Limerick aristocrat. In 1830, after his steward was murdered during a peasant revolt, Vandeleur decided to implement Owen’s communitarian system on his estate of Ralahine, County Clare. Upon the recommendation of the prominent Liverpool co-operator John Finch (see Part 3, Chapter 19), Vandeleur enlisted the help of the young Manchester socialist Edward Thomas Craig (1804–1894), who was hired as estate manager, steward and schoolmaster. Finch visited Ralahine in the spring of 1833 to report on the community’s progress, and his positive account was published as a series of fifteen letters in the Liverpool Chronicle, and then reprinted in the New Moral World five years later. Like Owen, Finch believed that co-operative and communitarian leadership should be entrusted to men of power like John Scott Vandeleur. Consequently, his letters praised Ralahine’s regime of paternal benevolence as an alternative to the Poor Law system and to the spread of political radicalism in Ireland, in the context of Daniel O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic emancipation. Despite its top-down character, Ralahine was also a democratic community in some respects, as its day-to-day affairs were over-seen by a committee elected by universal suffrage. Vandeleur’s tenants were also granted freedom of religion. Nevertheless, as alluded by Finch in his first letter, the young aristocrat suffered from a gambling addiction, which ultimately bankrupted Ralahine. The community was sold in 1833 to Vandeleur’s creditors. Former residents received no compensation. E.T. Craig later joined the Manea Fen 447community, founded in Cambridgeshire by William Hodson in 1838 (Harrison 1969, 218–220; Garnett 1972, 108; Geoghegan 1991).]
