We in Ireland (or rather the Republic of Ireland) have a lazy, solipsistic tendency to think we are the greatest little country in the world (and not just to do business in). I have spent most of the past fortnight in another small country on the far side of the world which, I would contend, can lay far better claim to that title.

Chile is a long thin snake of a country squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean and running from the Atacama desert (the driest place on earth) in the north, through the Mediterranean climes and cool rain forest of the centre, to the sub-Antarctic tundra of Tierra del Fuego in the south. It contains the oldest inhabited site in the Americas (12,500 years); the finest wine in the Southern hemisphere; breathtaking mountain and lake scenery that surpass anything in the Alps or the Rockies, and…