A £79K day at the slopes

It's difficult to beat the efforts to turn Barnsley into a Tuscan hill village as an example of how the EU wastes money, but this comes fairly close:

The European Union has given £79,000 to a Danish businessman to build a ski slope - on an island where snow rarely falls and there are no high hills.

Ole Harild lives on the island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea, which is known for its sunny climate and lack of snow.

Mr Harild had been unable to go skiing abroad one year with his wife because of work and came up with the idea of building his own Alpine ski run for the island.

Not thinking it would come to anything, Harild put in a request for an EU subsidy in the winter of 2006.

"I never thought they (the EU experts) were going to back something so crazy," Ole Harild said.

"But since the money had been released there was no reason not to go ahead with the plan."

With the money made available Mr Harild bought a machine to mark out the run, a snow blower and 80 pairs of skis and boots for hire.

Unfortunately, the run was open only for one day last winter but Harild said that in spite of predictions of global warming he lives in hope that one day cold weather will return.