Rural Ireland owes an immense debt of gratitude to Sir Horace Plunkett, the idealist mainly responsible for the founding and spread of the Irish co-operative movement. The many small co-op creameries throughout the land which prospered - for a while - were one legacy of that movement. Most are now amalgamated in the few huge dairy co-ops but their story still intrigues. This 200-page book, by an industrious journalist, is about just one of those small co-ops - the Centenary Co-operative Creamery Society Ltd, of Ballyduff, County Tipperary, so-called because it was founded in 1898, the centenary year of the 1798 rising, and in 1998 celebrated its hundredth birthday. As well as being a detailed history of the Ballyduff co-op and its founders and members, this is also a well-told tale of a vanished world - an Ireland of milk churns on asses' carts, of leisurely chat on roadsides, of threshings and harvest dances, of fairs and "tanglers". Progress called a new tune. Centenary survived and prospered; long may it do so. The book has a foreword by the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Joe Walsh, and there are many interesting photographs.