Our wedding correspondent: 'What I've learned from writing a thousand wedding stories'

Eve Kelliher has covered big days involving everything from hurricanes to helicopters, and new legislation to a pandemic

Aisling O’Neill and Phil Ryan. Picture: Ciara McCullough, Tilted Tripod Weddings

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans, said John Lennon.

That goes for wedding planning — and every other kind of planning. 

Working in Irish Examiner back in 2000 I was, out of the blue, asked to write about a wedding for Weekend.

I was taken aback. Why would anyone want to read about someone’s big day? And would the bride and groom be willing to talk about it?

But I found a couple, filed the story — and promptly forgot about it.

Until I was asked if, by any chance, I had another wedding for the following week.

And the same thing happened the week after — and the one after that.

It seemed that yes, people did want to read about weddings.

And two decades on, they still do. In those early days, brides and grooms would arrive, with their velvet-covered wedding albums in tow, and settle themselves down in the Irish Examiner’s Academy Street reception sofas for a chat about exactly how they first laid eyes on one another.

Cardboard-backed envelopes replaced the plush albums and framed portraits and started to crisscross the county bounds after I moved back to Kerry a couple of years later.

Melanie Joughalian and Lachlan Porteous are photobombed by a deer at Ladies View, Killarney in 2019. Picture: Adrian O'Neill

Where, along with regular news coverage and features, wedding stories also inevitably glided onto my beat.

Kerry and Killarney tend to provide headlines as a nuptial capital anyway — a bit like a mistier, more rain-dappled version of Italy and Lake Garda as a wedding destination of choice.

And besides, in the years that followed, the area was to become a focal point historically in Ireland’s wedding annals.

Killarney hosted Ireland’s oldest couple to wed in 2007, as well as the first civil wedding outside a registry office (also 2007) and the first wedding to take place in a pub (2008) — all of which I attended, notebook in hand.

The first Irish pub/restaurant wedding took place in Kerry on July 4, 2008: Mervyn McHugh and Gosia Klinaszewska were married in a civil ceremony in The Laurels Bar, Killarney. Picture: Eamonn Keogh

Welcome historic changes, during the time I’ve been writing about couples trading vows, have in more recent years included Ireland’s marriage equality legislation, which meant that same-sex marriages started to take place from 2015.

Five years later, the pandemic was to alter the face of weddings also, but even Covid-19 hasn’t been enough to put a stop to romance. To illustrate the love stories, in the early Noughties, for the Irish Examiner Weddings of the Week, I would scan the accompanying snaps and email them with my copy to Weekend Wedding HQ in Cork.

To Generation Z-ers out there, I know this seems as quaint as sending messages via pigeon and creating long-exposure Daguerreotype portraits.

But what interests people stays the same. What we all secretly want to know is how the couple met, and what they wore — basically what their story is.

Ireland's first civil marriage ceremony outside an official registry office took place in Kerry in November 2007. Fergus Burke and Michelle Owens with their children Robin and Joshua pictured after their historic civil wedding in the Cahernane House Hotel, Killarney, in November 2007. Picture: Don MacMonagle

A wedding is also about the drama, about the production. And life quickly started to imitate art in this theatre.

As the years passed, the faces of the brides and grooms featuring became the faces of classmates and friends.

On two occasions, I was a bridesmaid at the weddings I wrote about. I recall one of those photoshoots: the bride was a friend who refused point-blank to allow the snapper to stage the bridesmaids around the groom in a photographic trend at the time.

This vogue involved peeping around trees, and one or more bridesmaids crouching and clutching the groom’s legs. Thanks to my cool-headed pal, that particular spectacle did not come to light.

But other trends from the Noughties that did make it into print included the passion for Trash the Dress sessions, where brides would give their wedding dress another airing, to take part in a fun photoshoot — to splash about in a river, or a waterfall, perhaps.

Michelle Devine from Newcastlewest, Co Limerick, who did a 'trash-the-dress' photoshoot at Torc Waterfall, Killarney, in September 2007. Picture Keith Woodard

Elopements have also become more prominent. It used to be Vegas and Gretna Green, now brides and grooms are descending on Ireland, to say ‘I do’ on the Cliffs of Moher and or Kerry. It was, in fact, in the latter county that a cheeky little deer photobombing Australian newlyweds ensured their nuptials went viral when we featured them in Irish Examiner in 2019.

Now, to bridegrooms. This is completely subjective. But when I started out as a rookie real-life wedding feature writer, I just adored it when it was the groom who picked up the phone (and in those times it often involved a landline).

Sometimes this could feel a little clandestine. As if, well, maybe the male half of the couple might not always be quite trusted to take charge of the narrative.

Sharanya Pradeep and Jonathan Reck who were married in Dublin in 2020. Picture: Hu O’Reilly

Particularly, one time when the (lovely) man I was interviewing blithely rattled off responses. And then came my question as to whether there were flowergirls or pageboys in the wedding party.

“There were,” he mused.

“What were their names?” I gently asked.

“Yerra, I don’t know. There was a ball of them there!” he replied.

Now, I could be wronging so, so many of those turn-of-the-millennium grooms, but their counterparts these days are much more likely to be involved in organising the whole event and colour-coding absolutely every element, should it be that sort of a do.

Unlike myself, I have to say. And that’s the funny thing. Because I write about weddings, people often mistake me for someone who obsesses over the tiniest detail of a wedding gown or buttonhole (guess what, I don’t).

Brendan O'Sullivan and Peter Tora who were married in 2019. Pictures: Ian Cronin

But what I do like is the plot. And weddings capture the imagination like few other occasions, for all of us, in every sphere and walk of life.

I was working in a regional publication, several years ago, when a local politician I knew strolled in for his copy, hot off the presses. Was he keen to peruse the latest council meeting report? No way. Waving the magazine aloft he informed all and sundry he simply had to pick it up early that week to read about his neighbour’s grandchild’s wedding.

In the past year, a businessperson rushed out from behind the counter as I queued to tell me how he’d read a feature I’d written recently. Which one, I asked (kind of guessing it might involve an aisle).

“The Kerry wedding in the ‘Examiner’,” he told me.

“Ah, is it because the groom gave the bride a present of a calf?” I asked.

His delighted reply? “No, it was because of the priest, I know the priest.”

Aisling O’Neill and Phil Ryan. Picture: Ciara McCullough, Tilted Tripod Weddings

There’s an aspect of every nuptial story that connects with every one of us, I firmly believe.

From ceremony arrivals in tractors and horse-drawn carriages to proposals involving helicopters, and from honeymoons in ice hotels to beach party nuptials, and even pandemic nuptial celebrations in back gardens — the past two decades have brought so many stories.

I’ve talked to couples who wed in hurricanes and stone circles and learned of soulful gazes across classrooms, bars and even the aisles of other weddings. The dresses have featured everything from saris to traditional creamy satin numbers to (a personal favourite) what one bride described as “a sweaty T-shirt”.

I once asked a friend who performs in a wedding band what he likes about the whole scene. “People are allowing us to share in their most special day. How could you not like that?” he said. 

The at-home/garden wedding of Carla Crerar and Hugh Higgins in summer 2020. Picture: House of Grá

It’s the same for all involved, whether family, friends, priest, or other celebrant, planners and suppliers — from photographers to florists and magicians to musicians.

And it’s not really that corny a sentiment.

I feel privileged to be in a position to share people’s stories. Yes, the ‘I do’ and the couples’ recollections can be a focal point.

Sylvia Plath wrote: “I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence”.

You’d think looking back over 21 years of Weekend weddings, I’d see it as a potted history of fashion, music, travel, honeymoon and food trends. But I don’t. To me, it’s a tapestry — weaving in memories both personal and universal.