For three days four EU commissioners cooked to their heart’s delight under the approving eye of renowned chefs. The event was organised to highlight European cultural diversity.

It’s worth noting, of course, that the “cultural diversity” displayed at such events is of a distinctly Potemkin variety, roughly analagous to the old Soviet custom of regularly rolling out a troupe of folk dancers from some crushed nation or other whenever they wanted to reassure the easily duped that the USSR was indeed a happy brotherhood of free peoples.

French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist:

“Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected. Men cannot live happily alone and without values or any sense of identity: such a situation leads to nihilism, drug abuse, criminality and worse. With the spread of purely egotistic goals at the expense of the altruistic regard for family and nation, the individual begins to talk of his rights rather than his duties, for he no longer feels any sense of destiny, of belonging to and being a part of a greater and more enduring entity. He no longer rejoices in the secure belief that he shares in a heritage which it is part of his common duty to protect – he no longer feels that he has anything in common with those around him. In short, he feels lonely and oppressed. Since all values have become strictly personal, everything is now equal to everything; e.g., nothing equals nothing.”

Modern Ireland has swapped peat bogs and hot stews for motorways and double lattes, a newly-updated guidebook claimed today….

Dublin’s Temple Bar, with its lively pub and club scene, is re-christened “Temple Barf”. “By 3am, the only culture on display is in the pools of vomit and urine that give the whole area the aroma of a sewer,” the book says.