My Wedding Day with Bríd Ní Chumhaill: 'Our Dublin Airport reception kept costs down'

At the airport for the reception, we had the usual formalities like the speeches. We didn’t do a first dance — it wasn’t really something that was done in those days — we just took to the floor and danced in an ungainly manner and gestured for everyone else to come save us!

Bríd Ní Chumhaill and her husband Martin on their wedding day.

We got married on August 16, 1986; we’re coming up to our 40th wedding anniversary in a few weeks.

We were both living in Dublin at the time, and we got married in the chapel at St Patrick’s Teacher Training College, as it used to be known; it’s part of DCU now.

I was studying there at the time, and it was a nice small chapel, perfect for what we were looking for.

And then our reception was, would you believe, in the airport. There used to be a formal restaurant upstairs in Dublin Airport back then called Silver Lining.

Having our afters there boiled down to the simplest of things: We wanted to pay for the wedding ourselves and we didn’t have a huge amount of money to spare, so we were trying to keep costs down.

The food options in the Silver Lining suited us, and at a reasonable price. I remember we paid the bill at the end of the night and the total was £995!

When it came to finding my wedding dress, my sister and I went over to England to a wedding dress shop over there, but I got really scared off that whole experience when they stood me up on a pedestal. I was deeply uncomfortable with the attention and I panicked.

Bríd Ní Chumhaill and her husband Martin on their wedding day.

But then, out of the blue, one of our housemates said his mother would like to make my wedding dress — her name was Kathleen Roddy and she was a part-time dress designer in Belfast. I thought: “God, that would be great.”

So she made this fabulous simple dress for me, ballerina length with a nice twirly skirt and a simple bodice. I remember having to go up to Belfast a few times for fittings, and this was well before Google Maps, so the first time I went up, I got lost in an inhospitable area! That aside, the whole process was so lovely.

On the day of the wedding, we had invited both our families over to our house for lunch, and we all left for the church together. We got there early, so we were actually there to welcome some of the guests.

We were trying to reduce the formality of the wedding, so we called our bridal party our special witnesses. We’d been trying to come up with a term we both liked and we couldn’t, so we stuck with special witnesses. We had three on each side, and they wore their own outfits.

Martin actually wore white too on the day — a lovely white cotton suit and espadrilles, and he looked very dashing.

Bríd Ní Chumhaill on her wedding day.

Our wedding ceremony was very much what we wanted, focused on church tradition rather than church law. We ended up with a ceremony where we were able to believe every word that we said and say every word that we believed, which was really lovely.

As we walked down the aisle after the ceremony, we sang Laudate Dominum as a four-part harmony. There were about 10 or 12 of us who learned the music. Marian McAvoy is a friend of mine; she’s Eleanor McAvoy’s sister, and she agreed to organise the music for us.

She suggested Taizé style, which was these beautiful, dignified chants in Latin. We did a fair few rehearsals before the day, and it was just joyful, all singing together.

At the airport then for the reception, we had the usual formalities like the speeches. We didn’t do a first dance — it wasn’t really something that was done in those days — we just took to the floor and danced in an ungainly manner and gestured for everyone else to come save us!

Bríd Ní Chumhaill and her husband Martin on their wedding day.

We had a great night. The party was split between two rooms: Where we had the meal and then a separate dance floor, and that was perfect.

It meant people were able to sit and chat and take a break. The band started things off, but then halfway through, we had a big sing-song.

The band sat down and joined us for some drinks during the sing-song, and then they got back on stage to finish things off.

Myself and Martin were the last to leave on the night.

Typically, the bride and groom left well before everyone else in those days, but we didn’t do the ‘going-away’ thing.

When we were leaving, we got the elevator down to the first floor of the airport and when the doors opened, we saw the best man and a handful of guests who had decided they weren’t ready to leave yet.

They were having a sing-song there so we joined them for a bit.

Then we headed to our hotel in Sutton for a few hours before we returned to the airport for our early-morning flight for our honeymoon. We joked, saying it was the dearest hourly stay in a hotel we’d ever have!

• Bríd Ní Chumhaill plays Imelda O’Shea, the retired sergeant, in Ros na Rún on TG4. Ros na Rún will return to screens for its 31st season in September.