Articles > Matchmaking in Ireland

“Taxes and death – they’re the only two certainties in life, so we’ll always have politicians and priests.” The bar philosopher put down his pint of Guinness. “And the two uncertainties are love and wealth, so we’ll always need matchmakers.”

In rural Ireland’s past, matchmaker made introductions not so much between marriageable men and women, but between their two families. They negotiated the complicated deals that traded land and dowries against beauty and skills. For farming folk a good union kept the farm in the family.

“There must always be the same name on the land, and that could not be unless there was a family coming to the man who had the land,” the writer Eric Cross recounted from conversations with rural families in West Cork early in the twentieth century. “A man who has a son who was ready for marriage would think of a girl who would make a good wife for him…and send some other man to start the business…someone who made a trade of matchmaking.”

If favorably received the next stage was ‘plucking the goose’ – coming to an agreement over the dowry going with the girl, which could be as much as a bull and twenty cows in some cases. Fortified by whisky the men would then ‘walk the land’ of the husband-to-be, assessing its quality and the value of the livestock. Clauses would be agreed to protect the son’s parents in their old age; rights to a room in family home, perhaps, and the milk of a cow to drink as well as dried turf enough for a fire to warm them through the winter.

Ideally both families would have benefited from the union. “A blanket is better off doubled,” the old folk said. And love? “After the settlement comes love,” claimed those same parents. In truth, though, few marriages were totally blind. The matched couple would have known each other from fairs and wakes, and from the meitheal, the community labor of harvests and turf cutting. Few weddings would be forced on unwilling participants, but sometimes the arrival of the matchmaker pressing the suit of a particular man would be catalyst for a girl to flee her home and elope with her true lover.

Professional matchmakers, (basadóir in Irish), tended to be horse and cattle dealers. Men who traveled widely, who knew many families and their business, who could be objective about the value of things. It was a gregarious calling, requiring talk and tact, and being able to hold your drink.

By the 1950s, with the introduction of rural dance halls, (many established by enlightened parish priests as meeting opportunities for the marriageable), and with cars aiding courting in country areas, and with a growing number of new-fangled marriages for love, it seemed that matchmakers were no longer necessary. Men and women were making their own arrangements.

Even the lonely hearts advertisements in the Farmer’s Journal changed. The ‘farmer with Ford tractor seeks farmer’s daughter with Rotovator, harrow and baler suitable for same, with view to marriage,’ type of plea beloved by Irish comedians and close enough to the truth to cause offence and laughter in equal proportions, became rarer. Personality and a sense of humor were the new currency of relationships.

It’s surprising then that Ireland’s last full-time matchmaker, Willie Daly of West Clare, has never been busier. “My grandfather was a horse dealer and matchmaker, but the travelling was on foot in his day and he only covered a local area. My father was a matchmaker too, though he didn’t do as much as my grandfather, and now I’m the third generation to do horses and matching. There is a huge amount of work for me, so much so that my daughter, Marie, has come into the business as well, which is the fourth generation.”

Marie and her father share out the clients between them. Requests for introductions to potential partners come from Australia, England, Europe, and the United States of America, as well as from within Ireland. In the modern world, the matchmaker’s traditional clients, the farmers trapped on the land and the country girls working in city hospitals and offices, are augmented by homesick emigrants and romantic-minded foreigners who want to marry into the country of their memories and dreams.

The matchmaking fees charged to the men are still higher than for women, reflecting both chivalry and market forces, but money enters the actual transaction between a couple less than before. “Women have their own jobs and houses and cars nowadays,” Marie states, “so it’s companionship they’re looking for, not financial security.”

Sitting in the kitchen of the Daly’s farm, she lists the skills of a matchmaker. “You’d have to be a ‘people person,’ going out of your way to meet new people and remembering everything about them, encouraging them to open their heart to you. You’d go on feelings a lot, on your instincts.” She poured out mugs of strong tea. “Dad has a real knack, he’s an ‘opposites attract’ kind of person so he’d put somebody who was really stout with a small, slight, little man, and it would work out.”

A matchmaker has to be an optimist, she believes. “Love can happen anytime – it’s like looking for one of your socks out a pair…if you’re searching you won’t find it, and then another day you’ll be going along looking for something else and up pops the sock.”

Willie Daly took up matchmaking almost by accident. He saw local farms being lost when the farmers couldn’t find wives and so had no children to follow them. Standing in his doorway he gestured out across the fields at the snug houses squeezed between the Burren’s tortured slabs of limestone. “The farms were sold to foreigners or abandoned. The country was dying and only for a lack of wives. So, I thought maybe I could do something about it.” His was a view similar to earlier times when village poets would publish the so called ‘Skellig Lists,’ satirical verses naming the unmarried of the parish, who were seen as in danger of losing the land for future generations, and so to be encouraged to wed by all possible means.

Willie and Marie back up their prodigious memories for personal details with an ancient, leather-bound book. The volume is a-flutter with scrawled notes, painstakingly scripted letters, and scribbled telephone numbers. Dog-eared pictures show farmers in their best suits. There are formal studio shots of women. One photograph is of eight Philippino maids working in the Middle East, with a plea to find each one of them a husband. More than anything the book is the Daly’s advertisement. Carried into any of County Clare’s legion bars, it announces them as ready for business. Clients fill in a questionnaire, including such self-revealing posers as; ‘What do you think is the main difference between men and women?’ ‘How would you deal with someone who wanted passion before you did?’ ‘Do you encourage people to talk to you by eye contact, a smile, or with body language?’

When the Dalys consider they have a good match the potential couple are encouraged to exchange letters and photographs before actually meeting. And the first in-person contact usually takes place under the eye of either Willie or Marie, and nearly always in a bar. “Draw them out, keep the conversation going, put them at their ease so they both show in the best light, that’s the secret,” says Marie. The matchmakers’ tools are drinking and dancing and horses, Willie believes, “A drink to relax them, and then close dancing at céilís – waltzes, and sets and plenty of time for talking. And if they’re young, taking them out riding horses during the day time has a great effect.”

Deirdre, waiting for her boyfriend in a bar in Enistymon, can vouch for the romantic potential for horses. “I went out to their farm with a few others, and Willie and Marie are always working on you, so it was horse trekking to start with and then I ended up being matched up.” She still looked happily stunned. “It was somebody else out riding and he had no intention of anything happening either, but the Dalys were very right about us. From the beginning they were trying to set us up, and we were ‘no, no, we’re not interested,’ and then it just worked in the end, and we’ve been together for months now.”

For the Dalys the nearby Lisdoonvarna matchmaking festival in September – ‘after the harvest, when you have the time and the money for courting,’ - acts as their annual trade fair. The hustle from one bar or dance to the next, book at the ready, as the small town fills with young and old in search of love and craic. There are three dances a day, morning, afternoon and night, with dancing in the streets as well, everyday for the whole month. “If you came here, and you’re not ready to find a partner, you’ll probably become ready because the place is just oozing with a kind of love aroma, and with happiness. Drinking and dancing and carousing, that’s what it’s all about,” enthuses Willie from the middle of a crowd of Dublin women, all eager to be written into his book.

Billy Archbold, in the Roadside Inn, agrees. “Shy people can do in Lisdoonvarna what they can’t do at home. It’s good, clean enjoyment. I’ve witnessed people getting a kiss and a cuddle – lonely people – and it was like winning the lottery for them, you could see that from the expression on their faces.”

Annie-Marie, a vivacious New Zealander, consulted Willie out of curiosity. “I’m a Scorpio, and my horoscope said I’m going to meet the right fella this weekend, and Willie’s book is really thick so there must be potential in that.” In the Matchmaker bar, she describes her ideal man into Willie’s ear; “Taller than me, into Gaelic football, able to talk about anything, must be a good dancer, and a good cuddle.” Willie listens, jotting down details in the book before assuring her, “A tall boy, I’ve put that down, and all the fellas play Gaelic around here, and they can all dance as well, so you’re alright there. Now, wait here a moment because I might have somebody for you.” Minutes later Annie-Marie was on the dance floor, waltzing in the arms of a partner a head taller than her. Later in the Hydro Hotel ballroom, Annie-Marie was still dancing, but not with the same man. “It didn’t work out, so I’m back doing my own matchmaking, giving them a test-drive around the dance floor.”

There were plenty of men to choose from. Among them John, a biscuit salesman who had driven down from Belfast with his cousins. “Ah, you know like, we’re sleeping in the back of the van, legs dangling out, and we’re here for fun. I’m free and single and I love smoking and drinking and socializing…but I would be on the lookout for somebody, like, and I’d be good to a wife if I had her, very good to her, there’s no problem there.”

Sporting a unique fur-fabric top hat, American-Irish Mark Flannaghan, looked out over the whirling couples in the Hydro. “God knows, but we have fun here every year.” He opened his coat to show rows of dangling perfume bottles.” They’re my own concoctions, and each one has a different scent, but they’re all to encourage love and romance.” Romance, in turn, encourages the local economy. “Twenty two thousand people have come through the town this festival, and they’ve brought in some five and a half million extra pounds to local businesses. But asked if he’s succumbed to the festival’s magic himself, Mark shook his head; “Seventeen years I’ve been coming here and, as they say, I’ve tried a lot of shoes on, but I still haven’t bought a pair.”

On the last weekend of the festival, dubbed ‘The Final Fling,’ the ultimate night’s dance in the Hydro features the ‘Queen of the Burren’ competition. There are elaborate hair-dos, full-arm white gloves, ball gowns and stiletto heels for the 20 finalists. To perform a party piece is mandatory. Self-penned poems are recited, songs sung, or Irish dances stepped out with the girls’ dress hitched up around thighs and shoes kicked off. The crowd waits expectantly for the result to be announced. New couples hold awkward arms around each other’s waists, though as the local television cameras sweep the audience, more than one ‘single’ man ducks quickly out of sight to keep his face from being broadcast.

For Willie and Marie Daly, the end of each matchmaking festival is the start of their busy time. Though they have introduced many couples to each other in the festival bars and at the dances, it seems that the shier, and therefore perhaps more serious of the seekers after marriage partners would have only given them their bare details. “We’ll work on them over the coming months – we’ll have to go home and pick the right person for each one, then call them up, get them to write to each other, exchange photos, arrange a quiet meeting and from there we’ll see how it goes.”

A few days after the Lisdoonvarna festival I met Willie again, this time at Ballinasloe Horse Fair. He had the book with him, a reminder that horses and matching went together. There was the clatter of hooves as trotting horses were ‘flashed’ along a strip of concrete behind us. “There would be people here asking me to find a match for them, and in truth it’s easy because if a man likes horses, he’d like people, and there is a softness in that man that would very easy come to like women.” Willie smiled knowingly; “And women and horses are both very beautiful, so if a man could love horses, he could very easily love a woman.”

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