ENGLISH ACTOR Lynda Bellingham, veteran of stage and screen, was in Leinster House on Thursday as a guest of Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald and Pat Breen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee. Bellingham – who will forever be known as the Oxo mum – is an ambassador for Barnardos in Britain, and she does a lot of work for the organisation.

She is currently starring in Calendar Girls at the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin, but took time out to see Leaders’ Questions – a bad comedy drama set in the Dáil.

“Lynda is a fascinating woman. She is a campaigner in the area of adoption and has written movingly of her own experience as an adopted child,” says Frances. “She was very interested in the work we have been doing in relation to adoptions in Vietnam.” The hit show Calendar Girls is about a group of Yorkshire women who produced a naked calendar for charity.

Imagine how much the Government could shave off the national debt if they threatened to produce a similar sort of charity wheeze. People would pay a lot of money to avoid seeing it.