O'Connor, Robert (1916–97), agricultural economist and public servant, was born 17 April 1916 in Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon. Having attended the local national school, he studied agricultural science at Mountbellew, at Albert College in Dublin, and finally in UCD. On leaving university, he was appointed (1940) a rural science teacher in Ballaghaderreen. He was then appointed the first head of a new vocational school, established in Elphin, Co. Roscommon, in 1942. While in Roscommon, he began to research the economics of local agriculture and conducted a number of surveys of farm income under the direction of Professor George O'Brien (qv) of UCD. The results were published in the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland and led to his being awarded a Marshall aid grant to study at Iowa State University in 1950–51. For the rest of his career he published many articles on the economic position of Irish farmers, including ‘A living from the land’, published in Studies (winter 1955), ‘Observations on the measure and distribution of Irish farm income’ in the Irish Journal of Agricultural Research and Rural Sociology, i, no. 2 (1968), and, notably (with Seamus Sheehy), Economics of Irish agriculture (1985). From 1954 he was employed by the central statistics office to direct the groundbreaking national farm survey, which was published in 1956 and led to some changes in agricultural policy, notably in the agricultural advisory service.
He moved to Monaghan in 1956 to serve as CEO of the Monaghan vocational education committee, but returned to the central statistics office in 1958. There, he took charge of the annual production of agricultural statistics and pioneered the application of innovative techniques which enabled the reliable estimation of annual farm output before the end of the year in question. In 1967 he joined the Economic and Social Research Institute as professor of economics, extending his research portfolio to include pioneering work on the environment and becoming its deputy director for almost ten years. He published extensively in several fields, including The Irish sea fishing industry (1990) and The impact of forestry on rural communities (1993). He also served on various governmental and OECD expert committees and groups and was a member of the catholic bishops' council for the west. He was president of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland and the first president of the Agricultural Economics Society. He was deeply involved in sport in his youth and played Gaelic football for Roscommon and for UCD. He captained the UCD team that won the inter-varsity boxing championships in 1940 and was a member of Elm Park golf club for many years. He and his wife Una had two sons and two daughters. He died 31 January 1997.