An Irishwoman's Diary

Question: What do the following have in common: cancer radiation treatment units, the Crafts Council of Ireland, the National…

Question: What do the following have in common: cancer radiation treatment units, the Crafts Council of Ireland, the National Gallery, the National College of Art and Design, the National Museum, the National Library, the Natural History Museum, the National Botanic Gardens, the Geological Survey of Ireland, the Veterinary College, UCD's science faculty, and the country's marine research programme?

Answer: these diverse institutions all owe their existence to the Royal Dublin Society, alias the RDS, and internationally known as host of the Dublin Horse Show.

Mind you, the 14 gentlemen who met one June day in 1731 in Trinity College Dublin, to form what they called The Dublin Society can hardly have known what they were setting in motion.

The prime mover was Thomas Prior. And given how much his society went on to achieve, he deserves to be better known. Now, thanks to a new RDS booklet, we can learn a little more about Prior and his 13 founding fellows.

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Prior was born in Rathdowney, Queen's County (Co Laois), in 1681, the son of an English soldier in the Queen's County militia, and was by all accounts a diligent, hard-working, practical man with a puritanical streak. After some time in England, he returned to Dublin to work as a landlord's agent. His clients included his friend the philosopher George Berkeley.

His experience in the property business led to a most unlikely publication: a "name them and shame them" list of absentee landlords (Berkeley included, and it is a testament to the two men that their friendship survived), together with details of their estates and incomes. As if that was not controversial enough, Prior proposed a 20 per cent tax on the estimated £600,000 taken out of the country each year by those absentee landlords. He also analysed the current state of Ireland's balance of trade, attacked the practice of appointing absentee Englishmen to government sinecures in Ireland, and advocated a "buy Irish" policy to foster native industry and provide local employment.

Here, then, was a man who never saw a problem without thinking of several possible solutions. Clearly, a man of his times. For these were "improving times" - the years of the Agricultural Revolution, when agricultural revolutionaries and other practical-minded men such as Thomas Prior were keen to use the latest knowledge to improve the world around them.

And so it was that, on June 25th 1731, Thomas Prior called a meeting to investigate ways "to promote improvements of all kinds". The minutes of that first meeting are short, and it seems the 14 gentlemen present quickly agreed to start the "Dublin Society for Improving Husbandry, Manufactures and Other Useful Arts". A week later they had second thoughts - and added "and Sciences" to the title. The DS became the RDS in 1821 when George IV became its patron.

The inaugural attendance was a motley collection of farmers and scientists, clergymen and lawyers, politicians and medics, and it is hard to imagine who today could bring a similarly varied group together. They did, however, share a common background, being for the most part of solid Anglo-Irish stock. At least nine had been born in Ireland, but they also included an Englishman (Rev Dr John Madden) and a Scot (Arthur Dobbs, MP). Eleven had attended Trinity College Dublin, which was then Ireland's only university.

Among the others, I have a particular soft spot for Sir Thomas Molyneux MP (1661-1733), a Dublin-born medic who was arguably one of Ireland's first modern scientists. Molyneux studied everything from the Giant's Causeway to the giant Irish deer, including blood circulation in reptiles, diseases of the eye, Viking forts and elephant jaws, and may have been the person responsible for adding science to the new society's brief.

The other founding members, to give each their due, were: Dr Francis LeHunte, William Maple, Dr Alexander McNaughton, John Pratt, Dr William Stephens, Thomas Upton, Jacob Walton, Richard Warburton, Judge Michael Ward and Rev Dr John Whitcombe. And the new booklet comes complete with illustrations of their homes and estates, plus a full list of all those who joined the DS in the years to 1800.

Let us not forget that this was a private society, one which undertook initiatives that in other countries were often the responsibility of government. For me, its lasting legacy is the institutions and programmes it founded or helped to establish and, though most of these institutions might eventually have been established anyway, thanks to the (R)DS they came into being sooner rather than later.

Many of them form a neat academic cluster around Leinster House, which was the RDS headquarters from 1815 to 1922, before it moved to its current home in Ballsbridge (where copies of this nicely illustrated new booklet are on sale in the library at €30; details from 01-6680866 or www.rds.ie). Nearly 275 years after it started, this august body is clearly still going strong. It continues to organise events, lectures, recitals, youth science and arts weeks, spring livestock and horse shows, publishes occasional books on the history of Irish science, and even keeps the herd book for the endangered Kerry cow. Thomas Prior would surely have been pleased.