multicultural festival

this week, canberra had what it called a 'multicultural' festival during the week. Today there were stalls from all over the world. Those that could be bothered were selling food, and the other stalls appeared to contain old posters from travel agents, a few people looking vaguely like they were from the advertised country (the women from swedish looking a bit abbaish, and the man from solvenia looking serious and a little confused) but i couldn't help feeling, tory like, that this was a huge waste of money. I mean, i sincerely hope it does make racists less racist, liberals more liberal but i doubt it. To top it all, northern ireland was left out of the united kingdom stand. Not wanting to come across all ian paisley or anything, but you know, and i didn't have time to find the ireland stall just to check there was someone from the north (politically correct enough for ya?) there. As annabel pointed out "no-one gives a shit about northern ireland anyway, they think it's all ireland" which said it all really. Poor me, disenfranchised ulster boy, so i sauntered over to the slovenia stall to look confused....