I had often thought about visiting the Butter Museum in Cork but never got around to it until last week. It’s hard to know how much importance we should attach to the current buzzwords of “provenance” and “authenticity”. Certainly, in today’s world of threatened veganism and anti-dairy sentiment in some quarters, the concepts are worth thinking about.

For the moment, butter has won the argument against margarine but we can easily forget that liquid milk consumption in the United States has declined by 40% over the last 30 years. Total dairy product consumption has only held up because of new uses for cheese, whey, skim and casein. All are under sustained attack from some food companies and venture capitalists with deep pockets.

The Butter Museum was opened in simpler days in 1985. The dairy quota had just come in and the public appreciation and expectation of sophisticated interactive interpretive displays was much less developed than now.

The Cork facility is a product of its time but whether it does justice to the modern Irish butter and wider dairy industry is another question.

The Irish dairy industry has transformed itself since the abolition of quotas. The increase of milk output by 60% means that more product at least initially ends up on commodity-type world markets and hopefully ascends the value chain under either the Kerrygold brand or as infant formula under one of the major international brands that are our customers.

Whether we should learn from the whiskey industry’s heritage establishment initiatives in Dublin and especially in Midleton and have a real national focus on the heritage and authenticity of Ireland’s present dairy sector or whether we stick with the visibly aging Cork facility is up to the collective Irish dairy industry to decide.

Ornua (formerly Bord Bainne/Irish Dairy Board) has a new video on show in the Cork facility – it’s fine insofar as it goes, but will it capture the imagination of prospective foreign customers? Unlikely. Many of our co-ops and processors have produced excellent histories of their own foundation and progress. The broad Irish dairy industry has not. Maybe it doesn’t matter but as well as the whiskey industry’s initiative, and the tourism sector’s outstanding interpretive centre in Newgrange in Meath, I have also seen extraordinary exhibitors of the provenance of our thoroughbred horse industry. It is striking that we have in neither our beef nor dairy sectors a similar “must-see” attraction for consumers and prospective customers.