My Wedding Day with Jenny Fennessy: To be honest, we planned the wedding around the band

Jenny Fennessy and Dylan Kennedy on a tandem bike after their wedding ceremony.

We got married on August 12, 2017. We’d first got together in 2008 so we were together a long time before we got married. We got engaged in 2016 and then had the wedding a year or so later.

We got married in my local church, which is St Mary’s Church in Ballysaggart near Lismore in Co Waterford. Then afterwards we went to the Minella Hotel in Clonmel, it’s such a lovely wedding venue. We often go back around our anniversary to have dinner there.

We had about 150 people at the wedding, and I think one of my favourite things about the day was being at the top of the church, and looking down, and it was filled with all people from different parts of our lives, from primary school and secondary school and college and work, and neighbours from when you’re growing up as a child and our families and everyone there together. I think there’s real magic in that. It happens so rarely in people’s lives, where everyone you care about and love is in the one room together.

Jenny and Dylan had 150 people at their wedding.

We organised the wedding ourselves and we were pretty relaxed about it all. We included different things that we both love. Dylan loves bikes so on our wedding invitations we had an illustration of a tandem bike, and it was so simple but really unique. After the ceremony, we had a tandem bike, and we cycled off on it up and down the road just for the craic.

My favourite colours are purple and teal so we had those colours as our palette on the day — including for my bouquet.

And then I love Volkswagen Beetles. My uncle had this lovely Volkswagen Beetle at the time, so he drove us from the wedding to Clonmel in that.

For my dress, I didn’t want to be going around 15 different wedding dress shops. I went to Memories in Cork and tried on a few dresses and found one that I was thought looked good. I hadn’t invested a huge amount of thought into what the perfect wedding day would look like and I think there’s a freedom in that. We just wanted it to be fun.

Jenny and Dylan share an intimate moment.

We got really lucky with the weather on the day — now in saying that we had a load of children of Prague all over Cork and Waterford so that may have helped!

On the morning of the wedding I was really happy and relaxed. My friend Catherine O’Callaghan did my makeup, and she’s a brilliant makeup artist, and Deirdre Barry did my hair, and I really trust them. And I thought ‘well, my hair and my makeup are never going to look better than they do right now, the dress fits, and the shoes are comfortable’ — so I was just happy to kick back.

Our photographers on the day were McMahon Studios — Grace and Hilda there are dear friends of ours. They are gifted photographers. They’re really relaxed and all about capturing moments instead of setting
everything up, and I think they got really brilliant shots because of that. We have some amazing photos of us amongst the landscape and everyday scenery of the local area, like a photo of me standing in front of a large red shed (I am a farmer’s daughter!).

Jenny Fennessy in her wedding dress from Memories in Cork.

Dylan’s best friend John was manager and part of a band called The Aristocrats. And to be honest, we kind of planned the wedding around their availability; we loved the band and we knew John was an amazing musician. So when we were picking the date, we asked him ‘when is the band free?’. And then we worked from that!

As we expected, the band was amazing, and everyone was up dancing all night. Our first dance was to 'A Thousand Years' by Christina Perri. We had asked the band to play a couple of waltzes as well to keep everyone happy, and that was great, although Dylan and I haven’t quite mastered waltzing. 

Jenny and Dylan held their wedding reception at the Minella Hotel in Clonmel.

We stayed up very late. I think it was about three o’clock. Both our families are chatty families, so we were happy to dance until the wee hours and then chat away.

I loved being in the church and see it all coming together: the music, the readings, our friends reading them, and the reflections. We spent ages thinking about all these things. Like with the readings, we read them all out loud to each other to help us decide on the reading that we like the most.

In a way, it was the first thing that that Dylan and I had worked on together; it’s a bit like a theatre
production in some ways. You’re choosing the text, and you’re choosing who’s going to say it, and the music, and you’re choosing the band, and you’re kind of curating the day in a way. And seeing it all coming together was just amazing.

• Jenny Fennessy and Dylan Kennedy produce and star in LOVESONG, by Abi Morgan, which will run in the Cork Arts Theatre from January 20 to 31. You can book tickets here