The Decline of the Cork Butter Market: A Comment

The lack of detailed studies on major economic institutions represents a serious void in Irish historiography. This is even more true in the case of marketing networks for agricultural products. James S. Donnelly's work on the role of the Cork Butter Market in the nineteenth-century Irish butter trade is therefore especially welcome.1 Perhaps it is a measure of the success of this contribution that one is stimulated to seek some extensions of ideas contained therein, and possibly a re-examination of some of the basic data. The most interesting and informative area of this study focuses on the institutional and ultimately entrepreneurial failure which underlay the decline of the Cork Butter Market (CBM). Faced with dynamic market conditions from the 1870s onwards-on the supply side of the emergence of new competitors soon fortified by innovations in processing and marketing, on the demand side changing consumer preferences in the British market-the CBM's reaction was woefully inadequate. The decline of the traditional trade in firkin butter was clearly inevitable. What was not inevitable was the rapid demise of the CBM itself. Donnelly identifies and describes major imperfections in the marketing system but the deep seated resistance to reform remains unexplained. If, as seems probable, this is a case of entrepreneurial failure one is faced with the intriguing problem: how does one account for such failure? Why, as is suggested, did butter merchants in Limerick and Tipperary display a more elastic response to a changing economic environment? One possible line of enquiry lies in a consideration of the market structure of the Cork butter buying business, the presumption being that market structure is a key determinant of the behaviour of economic agents.2 Between 1860 and 1880 the number of butter buyers associated with the CBM remained fairly constant at a figure of around fifty, not a very high number when set against a butter producing clientele of seventy to eighty thousand farmers. While the number of firms in a market is an important structural attribute the relative sizes of such firms and the spatial arrangement of their buying activities is of considerably greater significance. Unfortunately precise information is not provided on this point although it is stated that while a few butter buyers 'advanced as 1 J. S. Donnelly "Cork market: its role in the nineteenth-century Irish butter