With the harvest saved it was time for farmers to head off to Lisdoonvarna in Co Clare in search of a wife. Michael Finlan reported on the 1981 "season". – JOE JOYCE
PAT FLEMING has left his faded dreams of romance behind him in Lisdoonvarna again this year and gone back to his farm in Limerick to face the lonesomeness of another winter by himself.
Lisdoonvarna is one of the few places, outside of heaven, where love matches are still made, but Pat, who has 50 acres of good land in Ballagowl, is still a bachelor though not for want of trying. During his five weeks in Lisdoonvarna he spent £500 and danced the soles off his shoes in his efforts to win the heart of a girl forever, but nothing seemed to go his way.
“I think the girls I went after were too young, all of them in their twenties,” said Pat, who, at 37, doesn’t exactly have one foot in the grave himself. “I’ll have to look out for a girl of 39 or 40 in future. None of the young ones I made dates with showed up.”
This was Pat’s second year in Lisdoonvarna, high in the rarefied air of the Burren in Co Clare, searching with all the other bachelors for a wife. Every year at the end of summer, unattached men and women from all over Ireland are drawn there to reach out to each other and – sometimes – to hold on for life.
At 11.30 every morning during the season, there’s a dance in the pavilion down beside the spa wells that first made Lisdoonvarna famous more than a century ago. When photographer Noel Gavin and I went down there the other morning, there was only one couple on the floor waltzing around to the strains of The Stone Outside Dan Murphys Door. Up on the stage Donie Lynch hammered the ivories and Murt O’Dwyer squeezed the melodeon, and Donie told me that some mornings they can get up to 1,000 people.
“They’re all ages – from 15 up to 90,” he said. “They like waltzes best and then two-steps and barn dances. None of that pop stuff. The strange thing here is that the young girls like to dance with older men, the reason being that the older guys really know how to dance, unlike the young fellows of today. The girls also find that with the older guys there are no complications – everything can be kept platonic.”
Lisdoonvarna’s latest matchmaker comes in the unlikely shape of Jim White, the Fine Gael TD for Donegal, who owns the Hydro and the Imperial Hotels in the town. He usually holds romantic court in the Imperial on the main street, where he enters the name of all marriage hopefuls in a large black book.
A more traditional matchmaker, Willy Daly, who lives outside the town, is retiring altogether from the love business. “It seems to me,” he said, “that Lisdoonvarna is becoming too commercialised and is losing that relaxed and intimate atmosphere that made matchmaking worthwhile. With all this commercialisation, you’ll have nothing but shattered dreams and broken hearts.”
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