Just shy of a century ago the then Minister for Lands and Agriculture in the fledgling Free State government, Patrick Hogan, bemoaned the perilous condition of the co-operative movement and the country’s creameries.

“This is the only country in Europe, I think, where co-operative creameries compete with each other both for the purchase of their milk supplies and for the sale of their butter,” Hogan told the Dáil in November 1926.

Referring to the British market, he pointed out that: “Danish butter does not compete with Danish; it competes with Irish”.

In contrast, however, he noted that “any one Irish creamery will under-sell the other” when exporting butter to Britain.

“An English grocer can get four or five different quotations from the same number of creameries in County Limerick or Tipperary.

“The net result of this is to depress the price of all,” Hogan told the Dáil.

Ireland’s dairy industry has obviously been transformed in the century since Hogan called for action to restructure and reorganise the country’s milk processing sector.

Unfortunately, however, not everything has changed.

Hogan would surely be scratching his head if he realised that, 100 years on from his critique of the industry, the country’s co-ops are still undercutting each another on key butter export markets.

Maybe the row between Tirlán and Ornua regarding US butter pricing confirms that progress is rarely linear; or maybe it highlights that those in management positions in the two co-ops just don’t know their history.