Mystery message on fiver tracked to Tipp couple
WHAT started almost two years ago with a young couple in love and on a weekend trip from Tipperary to Killarney turned into a wide-scale Facebook campaign last week.
The campaign? To find the mystery couple behind a very mysterious message written on a €5 note which had been stuck to and left on the wall of the pub.
The message, green ink, read:
“James & Jess, 16th June 2018, next wknd we’re here, we will be engaged.”
Something you never really expect to see on a note, right? Well, this is exactly what Bernie O’Rourke - who’s husband came into possession of the note - thought when she saw this and so she decided to share a photo of the note on Facebook in the hope of finding out more about the couple who wrote it.
Bernie’s photo of the note (see inset) was fittingly shared on the morning of Valentine’s Day and by the time of going to print, it had been shared 657 times and seen by thousands around the world - and more importantly, seen by the two most important people - Jess Stokes and James Whelan, the couple behind the note.
The Kerryman got in touch with Jess and James - who hail from Tipperary - to see if they’d be interested in telling the story behind the message and they duly obliged.
It was June 2018 when the couple had settled in for the night in O’Connors in Killarney, a pub famous for the dollar bills which are stuck to the bar and walls, signed and left there by content patrons. written in
Wanting to get in on the action, James took the only note in his possession that he felt was similar enough to a dollar bill and with a green pen that was fast running out of ink, he wrote down their heartfelt message.
“Myself and Jess had only been together a few months and we met each other, we fell in love straight away and we knew that we were after meeting ‘ the one’ you know,” said James.
“We love going away at the weekends and we were down in Killarney and we’d done a bit of shopping and we popped into O’Connor’s for one or two drinks and sure we ended up staying there. There was a bit of craic there and we got to chatting to a few people there about the town and the pub, really,” he said.
“How it all came about then was that I was just admiring all the dollars that were on the ceiling and the fact that each one kind of had their own little message on it. I just decided then myself that I’d take a €5 note and so I asked the lady behind the counter if she’d got a pen or a marker to write the small note,” he continued.
After writing the note, James and Jess saw that there was a space up in the corner of the ceiling over the bar and so they sellotaped the note above the bar.
“We looked it at it once or twice that night but sure then look we left and went about our weekend and kind of forgot about it until it popped up last weekend on Facebook almost two years later,” he said.
To say that the couple were shocked to see the note a yearand-a-half on would be a big understatement.
“We were sitting at home on
Sunday evening and a friend of hers tagged Jess and I on Bernie’s post and Jess, she just started laughing. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t know what was going on. We saw the fiver, we saw the note and we read the story and we both just couldn’t believe it,” he laughed.
“I went onto my Facebook then and I’d been tagged by a few friends on a different post from a complete stranger so it really got around. It was a bit mad to be re-united with it in a way after all this time!”
James said that while he’s not sure how the fiver got from the wall back into circulation, he reckons that someone short a fiver for a pint spotted it one night and took their chance!
As for Jess and James, they’re now happily engaged and living in Ennis and they are planning their wedding for mid-June 2020, which will mark almost two years to the day since that night in O’Connor’s pub!
Here’s hoping that a return trip to Killarney is on the cards!