Séamas O'Reilly: On the good and bad old days of Irish weddings
Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan
Some time back in Ireland for my sister’s wedding last week meant seeing a lot of family for the first time in a while. It also meant re-introducing myself to the joys of a family wedding on home soil, as we’d not had one in Derry for nearly a decade. Like all modern weddings, it was filled with bespoke flourishes and personal touches, which meant it felt almost nothing like the weddings I went to when I was my son’s age.
As a child, the weddings I went to were generally all the same. Not a humanist ceremony bursting with individual traits, but a template Catholic service in a church that was close enough to the large, carvery-friendly building in the countryside, where the reception would be held. There, adults would mill around shaking hands with people they’d known all their lives and hadn’t seen in years, but say so little of consequence it was as if they were aliens pretending to be people; slapping backs, comparing travel times and distances, and saying how well the bride, groom, parents, the venue, and each other, looked.
