Sue often wondered how a brainy guy like Garret FitzGerald never seemed to get much done while he was taoiseach. Now we may have an answer: he spent the day nattering to his missus.
“We were in constant communication,” he tells the RTE programme FitzGerald at 80 this week. “It was domestic issues, primarily, if she rang me. There was an extraordinary story in the taoiseach’s department that she rang 28 times (in one day), but that was exaggerated.”
When he got home, there was still plenty to talk about with Joan. “(Cabinet confidentiality) certainly didn’t apply to my wife. I once came home after a difficult day. It took me about 2Å hours to tell her everything.”
They even had a chinwag at lunchtime because Garret made it home for lunch each day of their 50-year marriage.
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Joan, who died in 1999, was so devoted to her husband that she voted for him even though he begged her to support a more needy colleague. “She always voted for me and it was ridiculous as I had too many votes,” he says. “But I could never persuade her.”
Imagine how long he spent trying . . .
Bonnie Ireland is once again Scotland’s stand-in
Looks like the Scottish film industry has let another big movie project slip through its tartan fingers. Lee Hutcheon, an award-winning film-maker, has said lack of Scottish support has forced him to take a €9m project elsewhere.
The Aberdeen-based Hutcheon wanted to film the story of Johnny Ramensky, a famous safe-cracker, in his homeland, but will instead shoot it in Romania, Bulgaria and Ireland. “These countries have shown great enthusiasm,” Hutcheon moaned to the Daily Record. “Scotland really has to look at why it has lost so many films in the past 20 years.”