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PADDY SNACKERY:US food writer Colman Andrews tells Belinda McKeonthat Ireland, with its superb local ingredients and skilled artisan producers, has the potential to become a food-lover’s heaven

NO MATTER HOW much you love your potatoes, your soda bread and your smoked salmon, the sound of a government official going on – and on – about their importance to the country’s economy might tend to put a hole in your appetite, even if you’re a world-famous gastronome. So it was that Colman Andrews, co-founder of the prestigious food magazine Saveur, and an expert on cuisines Catalan, Italian and Rivieran, and one of the big-league figures in the US food world, wound up tasting the tedium at a Bord Bia symposium on speciality foods in Kinsale back in 2002.