Plunkett

The name is Anglo-Norman and the sources do not settle it. The usual reading takes it from le Plonquet, a diminutive of plonque, a small piece of wood or a stake, though the etymology is contested. The route is not in doubt. The family was Norman French, established in England by the early twelfth century, and reached Ireland on the late-Plantagenet Anglo-Norman migrations of the thirteenth. The older spelling Plunket, with one t, ran alongside the modern form and is the one the records use for the family that held Dunsoghly in County Dublin.

Where they settled decided everything that came after. The Plunketts went north into Meath and Louth and the country around Dublin, the district that hardened into the Pale, and stayed there. They were Old English, and they remained Old English and Catholic at the same time. Holding both of those at once is the whole of their early modern history.

The seat came out of another man's building programme. Dunsany Castle was begun around 1180-81 by Hugh de Lacy, the Anglo-Norman lord who also commissioned Killeen Castle nearby and Trim, the largest castle in Ireland. De Lacy's tenants the Cusacks held Dunsany and Killeen on his behalf, and both places passed by marriage to the Plunketts in the early fifteenth century. The family did not build its power base, it married into one: a pair of Meath strongholds already two centuries old.

The first Plunkett generation to hold the two of them split them. Killeen went to the eldest son, Dunsany to the younger, Christopher, whose line became the Barons of Dunsany. By the fifteenth century the baronies of Killeen, Dunsany and Louth were all in Plunkett hands: three peerages carried by one family, in a lordship that had come to them through the marriage bed rather than the field.

Not every Plunkett house was a barony. Dunsoghly Castle, in the civil parish of St Margaret's in County Dublin, is a mid-fifteenth-century tower house: four storeys, a turret at each corner, a small chapel built against the south wall, and low bawn walls with earthwork defences running to the west and south. A fighting tower with a chapel attached to it is a fair enough picture of what a Catholic Old English family in the Pale actually needed.

The Plunkets were still living there in the 1870s, in what one description calls a cramped Irish castle, uncomfortable by post-medieval standards, long after the fashion for such houses had gone. The tower passed into state ownership in 1914 and is a National Monument in the care of the Office of Public Works.

The Catholic Old English were on the wrong side of the Cromwellian settlement, and the single break in Dunsany's long occupation falls in that decade. Lady Dunsany defended the castle when it was first approached. The defence held nothing permanently: in 1649 the family were put out of Dunsany altogether, and some of them died on the road to Connaught.

The interruption did not last. The Dunsany line held the castle almost without a break from the early fifteenth century to the present day, and Dunsany stands as one of the oldest continuously occupied houses in Ireland, possibly the longest lived in by one family. Festina lente, make haste slowly, is the family motto, and it reads differently once the road to Connaught is in the account.

A family that kept its baronies also kept its religion, and the seventeenth century is the century in which that cost something. Three Plunkett brothers were consecrated bishops in those years, and it is those three, not the barons, who sit at the centre of the family's own account of itself. Oliver Plunkett took Armagh in 1669 as Archbishop and Primate of All Ireland, the senior Catholic churchman in the country.

That primacy is the reason most people have heard the surname at all. It ended at Tyburn in 1681, and his preserved head is still held in a glass reliquary at St Peter's Church in Drogheda.

Joseph Mary Plunkett was born at 26 Upper Fitzwilliam Street in Georgian Dublin on the twenty-first of November 1887, second son of Count George Noble Plunkett and Mary Josephine Cranny of a wealthy Dublin business family. His father was a Papal Count, Director of the National Museum of Ireland, and MP for Roscommon North from 1917 to 1922. The son was raised between the Fitzwilliam Street townhouse and Larkfield, the family place at Kimmage on the southern edge of Dublin, was schooled at the Catholic University School in Leeson Street and at Belvedere College, took his BA at the National University in 1908, and spent much of his early twenties in Algeria, Italy and Sicily for the tuberculosis he carried all his life.

He published his first volume of verse, The Circle and the Sword, in 1911, and from 1912 edited the Irish Review, the monthly at the centre of the Irish cultural revival, with Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, AE Russell and James Stephens among its contributors. He and MacDonagh taught the boys at Pearse's school, St Enda's in Rathfarnham, and the three of them produced the school's annual theatricals together. Those working friendships are the reason a consumptive poet and editor ended up inside the leadership of an insurrection.

A Volunteer from the founding of the movement in November 1913, he came out of the September 1914 split with the breakaway minority as its director of military operations. In April 1915 he travelled to Berlin to negotiate the supply of German arms, the negotiation that became the Aud expedition of April 1916, whose consignment the Royal Navy intercepted off the Kerry coast on the twenty-second of April. He was sworn into the IRB in 1915 and elected to its seven-man Military Council early in 1916 as Director of Military Operations.

Between January and April 1916 he drafted the military plan of the Rising at Larkfield itself, the Kimmage house where the returned emigrant Volunteers of the Kimmage Garrison were billeted and trained: the seizure of the General Post Office, the linked perimeter positions across central Dublin, the lines of communication, the supply, the rules of engagement. He fought Easter week in the GPO garrison beside Pearse and Connolly and signed the Proclamation as Director of Military Operations, and he was carried out at the surrender still weak from the throat surgery he had undergone ten days before the Rising. He was tried by field general court martial at Richmond Barracks on the second of May 1916 and lies in the quicklime grave at Arbour Hill with the other executed leaders.

The name kept working after 1916. Sir Horace Plunkett (1854-1932) was an agricultural reformer and the founder of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, the body out of which the Irish co-operative movement grew, a quieter kind of Plunkett achievement than a primacy or a proclamation.

At Dunsany the writer Lord Dunsany did much of his work in a room in one of the castle towers, and the house holds the gallery of the twentieth baron, the artist Eddie Plunkett. Trim, the other Plunkett castle and the largest in Ireland, went to the State as a ruin in 1993. Dunsany did not: in 2025 it was still owned and lived in by Randal Plunkett, twenty-first Baron of Dunsany, on ground the family took by marriage in the early fifteenth century and have held, with one Cromwellian interruption, ever since.