Irish revolutionaries, misunderstood moggies and secrets of the beautiful game – Lees is most definitely more
THREE years ago this week the Irish-American movie star Maureen O’Hara died. She was 95. O’Hara was her screen name, she was born a Fitzsimons in Ranelagh, a Dublin suburb, to well-to-do parents (her dad was a part owner of Shamrock Rovers football team). A screen test, which she “failed”, was spotted by Charles Laughton, who was captivated by her beautiful eyes and he became her mentor. The rest is legend.
Her most famous role was with John Wayne in The Quiet Man, directed by John Ford, set in Ireland and filmed in the village of Cong in Mayo, which now has its own commemorative museum. She made many films with Wayne (both claiming they were friends rather than lovers) who was an obsessional anticommunist. He distributed Zippo lighters to soldiers during the Vietnam War inscribed with the legend, “F**k Communism” and starred in the only film to support the war, the risible The Green Berets, when he was 60.
I don’t know if they shared politics, although I doubt it. In her autobiography ’Tis Herself she describes the filming of Graham Green’s sombre novel Our Man In Havana as, gulp, a spy comedy. She and the crew, under the British director Carol Reed, were in Havana just three months after the successful communist revolution which overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista. Actually, there’s a film to be made about the making of that film ... but to the point. She was staying at the Capri hotel and when she was in the restaurant Che Guevara would often come to her table to talk.
She recalled: “Che would talk about Ireland and all the guerrilla warfare that had taken place there. He knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history. Che knew more about Ireland than John Ford did. I couldn’t believe it and finally asked, ‘Che, you know so much about Ireland and talk constantly about it. How do you know so much?’ He said, ‘Well, my grandmother’s name was Lynch and I learned everything I know about Ireland at her knee.’ He was Che Guevara Lynch!”
She concluded: “Today he is a symbol for freedom fighters wherever they are in the world and I think he is a good one.”
I’m pretty sure she and “The Duke” fell out over that one.
Nae luck
LUCKY black cat? Hardly. A cat charity has revealed a black moggie is 13 per cent less likely to be rehomed than a multi-coloured one.
What a player
NO-ONE would claim that the footballer Kyle Lafferty wasn’t a highly committed professional on the field. But off it ..? He isn’t able to play for Rangers today against Hamilton having let down Northern Ireland at the 11th hour after being called up for Nations League ties against Austria and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The furious Irish FA invoked the five-day rule which bars players from featuring for their clubs if they miss an international. Lafferty’s on his second stint with Rangers. Including loans he’s been at nine clubs in his career. But it’s the year that he spent with Palermo in 2013 that is the most notorious. He had a three-year deal, he was the top scorer and fans’ player of the year in the first season, after which his contract was terminated. Club president Maurizio Zamparini put it this way: “He is out of control, an Irishman without rules. He is someone who disappears for a week ... he never trains, and he’s completely off the rails. On the field he’s a great player, because he gave us everything he had and more.”
Lafferty laughed off these claims in a subsequent interview and it looks like he may now have settled down again in his second marriage.
March of the ants
LAST week was football’s international break – our guys took it to heart by not turning up against Israel – but there was one terrific result for one small Glasgow junior
side, St Anthony’s. Each break the Serie A team Roma recommend fans support a non-league team and, following a tweeted suggestion from someone who may or not be connected to the Ants, the Italian giants picked out the South West Region League Two side. There followed a deluge, with 3,700 Roma fans from across the globe following the Ants on Twitter, even going as far as having the team’s line-up read out on radio in Nigeria. Whether or not that had any effect on the players, the struggling team – at the time of writing third-bottom of the league – went out and humped Johnstone Burgh 3-1.
The Ants now have more than 5,000 online fans and growing. Whether that translates into galoshes on the terracing (McKenna Park can resemble Chernobyl on a bleak winter’s day) remains to be seen. Forza St Ants.
Scheme of things
ONE of the stars – if that’s the right term – of the controversial docusoap, The Scheme, who lost both legs and an arm to sepsis, is again trying to raise £30,000 for a bionic arm.
Annie Caddis, then known as Roseann Cunningham, featured in the first episodes of the 2010 show which followed the lives of poor families in Kilmarnock’s benighted Onthank estate.
But she and her husband Gordon pulled out after a huge DWP fraud investigation. She had claimed benefits as a single person, saying she split with her husband on their wedding night, after a violent row which ended in her hitting him with a vodka bottle. However, the show appeared to show the couple living together and Caddis was initially suspected of fiddling £60,000 in benefits.
The documentary also featured the life of her junkie nephew Marvin Baird – catchphrase “Happy as Larry” – his dog Bullet and his ex Dayna McLaughlin.
Caddis’s son Christopher Cunningham, who shared a flat with Baird and the dug, admitted heroin possession earlier this year after a police raid on the place. But he dodged jail in April because of Annie’s sepsis when sympathetic Sheriff Shirley Foran imposed just a supervision order and warned him he was on his last chance.
Days earlier, Caddis has been operated on for a kidney stone but a boil ruptured, the poison spread throughout her system and she had both her legs and her right arm amputated, and spent a month on life support.
She has now been fitted with artificial legs. Daughter Kimberley set up a crowdfunding page to raise the £30,000 for the bionic arm.
But in five months it raised just £3,000 so last week she relaunched the appeal.
Good luck with that one.
Lees lees, less if you please
I think it was the FT which came up with the Mars bar standard, which measured our wealth and the value of the pound against the chocolate ingot. If it declined in size then we weren’t doing so well.
So I have decided that Scotland needs its own confectionery currency, to measure not our financial but our physical health, and what better than the macaroon bar? And frankly we’re not doing too well.
Here’s how it works. If Lees, the maker (which also produces other sweet treats like snowballs), sees a rise in sales and profits then we’re clearly not cutting back on sugar and it’s having an effect on our waistlines. Nothing against the Coatbridge-based company, I’ve swallowed a few of its products in my time, and wish it all success. This is a serious statistical exercise. So I have to report that not only is Lees’ turnover up to almost £20 million but operating profit is also up by five per cent, even with rising raw material costs. Based on this evidence I am now writing to the Scottish Government to suggest that it sponsors Fitbits for the entire nation, even tucked into the baby boxes.
Brushing up on art
TIME to update that old saw about watching paint dry. Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch is to be restored by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. It has been subject to two slashings – in 1911 and 1975 – and in 1990, had acid sprayed on it. The restoration will take many years and will be shown on the internet live throughout the entire period. It will cost untold millions of euros to fix, so perhaps it should plan a Netflix-alike charge to view? The painting measures four metres by 4.5 metres so you’ll need a pretty large screen to watch it, as well as diamondhard eyeballs and the physical constitution of a superhero.
Sprung apart
I know we shouldn’t laugh at the misfortune of others but Claire Busby’s lover did, and loudly, when she was catapulted out of bed during rumbustious sex. Unfortunately, she suffered a severe spinal injury and is suing – not the other party, John Marshall from Alloa – but the bed company. Unsurprisingly the couple are not now together.