Drunk in love
A matchmaker and a festival keep an Irish tradition alive
After 50-odd years in the business of romance, Willie Daly has a lot of stories to tell. Like the one about the man who fell to his knees in front of a woman, followed her to the altar and only later admitted that he had not meant to propose — it had been a long night, and he had tripped.
Or the one about a woman whose potential suitors kept hanging up after asking her age, until Daly advised her to say she was young at heart. After that, the 83-year-old widow enjoyed two months of delightful conversation before dying.
“We are all looking for the simple thing of love,” Daly said, as one of his six daughters — he also has two sons — stoked the peat stove in his kitchen on a raw winter morning recently outside Ennistymon, a village on Ireland’s rural west coast. “To be cherished, to feel special.”
Daly — who thinks he is in his early 70s but does not know precisely because, he says, the priest who kept such records drank a lot — has been thinking about love most of his life. A horse farmer by trade, he is one of Ireland’s last traditional matchmakers, best known for presiding over the annual matchmaking festival in nearby Lisdoonvarna — a weeklong autumnal event famed for its all-day dancing and spontaneous, often late-night, marriage proposals.
While the festival is on, Daly conducts business in a pub. For a small fee (usually 300 to 500 baht), he takes down the details of those seeking partners. He keeps these details in a large, overflowing book held together with tape and a shoestring, inherited from his matchmaker father and possessed, he says, of supernatural romantic powers (if you touch it with one hand, you will fall in love in six months; both hands, you will be married in six months; and if you are already married, you will fall in love all over again).
Then, sometimes with no more than a twinkle and a nod, he might introduce two people, buying a woman a drink or nudging a farmer toward the dance floor. “There’s a good deal of magic in it,” he said. “I’m not a big believer in too many words.”
The rest of the year, Daly makes matches by mail and by telephone, although visitors from as far away as New York have turned up on the doorstep of his County Clare farmhouse. “I know a lot of people are going on the internet now,” said Daly, who has just recently decided to learn how email works. “But it’s cold — it’s a machine.”
Daly was privy to his father’s negotiations from a young age. Back then, marriage was more of a practical matter. “I remember a big, tall, good-looking fellow, with a big red face, who came to wait for my father in the parlour,” Daly said. “My sister asked him, ‘What kind of a girl would you like?’ and his mother answered, ‘Michael wants a girl who will help with the sheep.’”
Bound to the land, bachelor farmers had little free time and were often shy. And because of land inheritance rules, men were often decades older than their brides; love was expected to come later, with children. Still, Daly said, even these businesslike arrangements had a gaiety he found infectious.
By the time he was 12, Daly had dropped out of school and was working full time on his father’s potato farm.
At 15, Daly made his first match. Seeing that a farmhand named John had blushed when he walked past a young woman at Sunday Mass, and that she had blushed, too, he decided to help them meet.
“One day I was looking in the local paper, and her father had a fat pig for sale,” Daly said. “I says to John, ‘Why don’t we pretend we want to buy the pig?’”
It worked. After challenging the pig’s fatness and receiving a tart reply, the farmhand looked the farmer’s daughter in the eye and asked if they might eat it together. Shortly afterwards, they married.
Despite early success, Daly was in his mid-20s before he thought seriously of continuing the matchmaking tradition. He was running the family farm and, following a lifelong passion, had bought his first horses. For fun, he played music and told fortunes at local festivals.
He says he suspected that matchmaking was on its way out until a neighbour asked him to find him a wife. He did, and Daly estimates that he has facilitated around 3,000 marriages since, although there is no official record. In this part of Ireland, though, much remains to be done.
“These good, decent men who didn’t marry, now they’re 60, 70 years old, and there’s no one to take over the farm,” he said. “When they die, it will be sold, and that’s a soft, sweet personality, a way of life, that’s gone.”
A look through Daly’s matchmaking book shows how things have changed. While details now include “personal preferences”, like a love of travel, an entry from his father’s time reads, simply: “12 cows”.
Women’s desires have shifted the most, he said. “In the past, women needed a roof over their heads, a little house of their own. Now, they want to like the man.”
Marriage is no longer a primary concern. Daly, who is himself in the process of divorce, also caters to those just looking to date. “What men need hasn’t changed,” he said. “Someone to share their life with, someone to share their love with. Not to grow old alone.”
More recently, an influx of out-of-towners has added new dimensions to his work. While American women and Irish men often click instantly, “like a cow in a cock of hay”, other combinations are more challenging, he said.
In his experience, Italians simply do not drink enough to count as real romantics. “Proposals are more likely when you’ve been drinking,” he said.
Germans, on the other hand, drink plenty but are generally unromantic. Dubliners are picky, and American men sometimes have strange demands.
“One fellow wrote and said his future bride had to be ‘untouched by scalpel’,” said Daly, whose daughter had to explain what the man meant. “Around here, cosmetic surgery, it means getting false teeth.”
Two years ago, the matchmaking festival, which attracted 60,000 people last autumn, started a gay, bisexual and transgender weekend. “Everyone should be in love, all their lives,” Daly said.
Rory O’Neill, a drag performer and gay rights activist, said he was moved by Daly’s readiness to include gay singles in his oldtime matchmaking book. Yet he was confused by the “LOL” written beside names. Finally, O’Neill asked what it meant.
“Lots of land,” Daly answered.