As soon as you arrive in Ireland you leave the modern world. Every mile you travel west of Dublin is a also a mile west of the 20th century. By the time you reach Castlebar, you have reached a timeless region.
This is a pre 20th century economy based on the pig and potato and presided over by the priest.
AND we're only getting warmed up. The words are those of the Daily Mail columnist Bruce Anderson last Friday. His diatribe against all things Irish, but specifically the EU Commissioner for Social Affairs, the broad backed Padraig Flynn, should have him cited before the Commission for Racial Equality.
He may yet, however, end up before an Irish libel jury - yet another! Flynn has asked for counsel's opinion on the matter.
Anderson gets really nasty when comes to Flynn and Fianna Fail. "During his adult life he has never moved beyond the intellectual confines of west Mayo: limited, bigoted, anti modern," Anderson says.
The party is a "primitive", priest ridden, bigoted conglomeration of corruption", Ireland's "most anti British" and based entirely on hand outs, bled from the urban working class poor and European taxpayers, to its rural supporters.
Tell that to Bertie!
Anderson has to explain to his readers that, although described as conservative, Fianna Fail is "not a Thatcherite Tory party". Indeed. And we, the ignorant Irish, have at least that to be grateful for.
It would all be quite funny if it were not so serious. The outrageous, scarcely veiled racism of Anderson's attack on Flynn has as its purpose the re election of precisely that Tory party, however faint a prospect that may be.
On Tuesday the European Court of Justice will rule on whether the EU can legislate for a maximum 48 hour working week. The case, taken by Britain against all 14 other member states, hinges on whether a treaty clause allowing measures to copperfasten health and safety in the workplace can be the basis for the proposed legislation. If the 48 hour working week is not a health and safety issue, Britain can use its opt out on the Social Chapter.
The British Prime Minister, John Major, last week made it plain that if the court rules against him he will demand an amendment of the Union treaty at the IGC and failing to get that will block other reforms of the treaty.
The Tories regard the issue as good electoral ammunition to add to the issue of the Social Chapter itself which Labour is committed to signing.
Not surprisingly the loyal tabloids are rowing in with material rubbishing both and, if possible, anyone to do with them. Hence the attack on Flynn, the third in the Daily Mail in as many weeks.
Having got the abuse out of the way, Anderson proceeds to the real target, Flynn's social policy, a "disaster area", the European expression of the Irish hand out mentality.
"Europe has to earn its living," he preaches, omitting to mention the fact that perhaps Ireland could teach its British neighbour a few lessons these days about earning a successful living. On current form Ireland may outstrip Britain in GNP per capita by the year 2909.
The problem with the thesis is that Flynn did not invent the policy. He is merely carrying the torch for the former Commission President, Jacques Delors, its main architect, and for the broad centre ground of European politics which supports the social market. Ideologically this is a pure mixture of social and Christian democratic values.
Flynn, colourful and all as he is, is not an out and out extremist in European terms. His party - formally, of course, he no longer has any party connections - is associated with the same group as the current French government and the last Italian administration.
Consequently Flynn has taken to his portfolio like a duck to water and performed with a degree of competence and intelligence that has impressed most of his colleagues and close observers.
His arguments are straightforward: Europe has ban the hand, a choice between building an economic model based on high skills and a motivated, secure workforce, and competing on wages alone with the tigers of the Far East or the "Big Mac" economy of the US, on the other. The extremists in Europe - as at home - are the British Tories.
To support his argument, Anderson applies the coup de grace. He has heard, he says, that Flynn has been doing battle in the Commission to block a report which includes, as well as much else, tables setting out the cost to competitiveness of EU social policy. "Mr Flynn did not try to rebut the paper. He tried to suppress it instead," Anderson claims.
The truth is much less sexy. The figures were taken out of the report when it was pointed out by the French Economic Affairs Commissioner's staff, among others, that their source was the literature of a not entirely disinterested group, the European employers' confederation, UNICE.
