First Dates Ireland recap: When the only thing scarier than love is a crisp
First Dates Ireland: Erin and Adam
First up in this First Dates episode, Adam tells Bangor girl Erin he is not a serial killer - not the most reassuring way to start off the date but given that our affable lab technician is afraid of crisps it’s a safe bet to say Erin clearly has nothing to fear. Erin talks movingly about her personal hearing loss and learning lip reading as a teenager, whilst Adam insists a love of CSI Miami is what got him working in forensics. He is now working in Limerick, which let’s face it is basically the Miami of Ireland.
Listing a poppadom as his ultimate phobia - "It’s just a giant crisp" - Adam rightly doesn’t leap at the idea of meeting Erin again as a friend when she shoots down the idea of a romantic potential. "It’s called First Dates," he points out, demonstrating his forensic abilities to strip a hypothesis down to the nuts and bolts.
Meanwhile, Síne and Ruairí are bonding over their guilty pleasures, in Ruairi’s case, Dungeons and Dragons. “It’s not a red flag,” assures Síne, and she is about as convincing as Tom Cruise’s Irish accent in his 90s stinker Far and Away. Still, when Ruairí orders her gluten-free bread we know these kids have a future, and our faith in young love is restored.
While Síne and Ruairí flirt up a storm, Mary and Boo are also getting on like a house on fire, with both sharing a passion for open-mindedness and astrological combinations. The immensely affable Mary is delighted with her blue-eyed date, and even though she doesn’t find her happy ending with Boo, we are reliably informed in the epilogue that she has found a Betty Davis love match elsewhere.
Finally, Melissa is eager to prove to her date Simon that she is not just a pretty face, having studied engineering and appeared on Countdown, even scoring an eight-letter word on the show. Simon grew up in Hong Kong and is open about suffering from what is often considered an unfortunate speech impediment - that of an English accent. Thankfully Melissa suffers from the same predicament, and there is clearly a spark between this lady in red and her well-spoken suitor.
When we learn in the follow-up that geography is keeping this handsome duo apart we can only hope one of them does something impetuous and ill-advised soon like sell their house and move in together, because with Simon’s love of numbers and Mel’s love of words they are a match made in Sudoku-Scrabble heaven.
It remains unknown whether this coupling will blossom into a four-letter word, but we have hope at least, which in the world of First Dates, is a lot.
- First Dates Ireland is on RTÉ2 on Thursdays, and is available on the RTÉ Player
