The Match and the Fortune

A marriage in the West of Ireland was arranged between two fathers, in a public house or at a fair, over a sum of money.

This is the part of the story that people find hardest to hear, and it is also the part that explains everything else. Not because the Irish were cold. Because the arithmetic left no room.

1860. How a match was made

A third party raised it. He might be a relation of one side, a publican, a cattle dealer, or a man in the parish known for having a hand in these things.

The girl's people came to look at the land. They walked it, counted the stock, looked at the roof and the byre and the state of the ditches, and formed a view of what the holding was worth.

Then the two fathers bargained, and what they bargained over was the fortune. Often it took several sittings. Agreement was sealed with a bottle of whiskey and then written into a settlement before a solicitor, because this was a property transaction and everybody understood that.

The couple might have met once. Their consent was real and it was not nothing, but it was the last thing established rather than the first.

The work was seasonal. Matchmakers were busy from Little Christmas on the sixth of January to Shrove Tuesday, because marriage was barred through Lent and a match not closed by then waited a year.

The rule of thumb that closed the system

The fortune matched the valuation of the farm it was coming into.

A good farm attracted a good fortune. A poor farm attracted a poor one, or none.

Like married like, and the whole thing was self sealing. A small western holding could not attract enough money to settle its own children, which meant its children went, which meant the holding stayed small, which meant the next generation faced the same arithmetic.

1905. Where the money actually went

Here is the point that is almost always missed. The fortune did not stay with the couple who married.

It was paid straight out again.

It went to give the groom's sister a fortune of her own, so that she could marry out of the house. Or it bought a brother his passage to America. Or it set a sibling up in a shop, a trade, or a religious house.

One fortune came into a farmhouse in a generation, and it settled one sibling.

A household with four children to settle had one payment to settle them with.

Shrovetide, and the public accounting

Because marriage was barred through Lent, the weddings piled into the days before Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday was the heaviest day of the year.

What happened to those who did not make it is worth recording, because it shows the pressure the system put on people.

On Chalk Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent in Munster and Leinster, the unmarried were marked with chalk by youths in the street. The custom survived into the 1930s and 1940s in places.

In parts of Munster, local poets wrote the Skellig lists: printed sheets naming the unmarried of the parish, built on the joke that Easter fell later out on Skellig Michael, so anyone still single could row out there and marry in time.

Both customs are usually described as harmless fun. Read them beside the census returns and they look like something else. A parish that had to mark its unmarried in chalk once a year was a parish with a great many of them.

1930. What the fortunes were worth

Honesty about the evidence is needed here. No verified schedule of dowry sums by decade and by farm size exists in any source reached for this series. [1]

What can be said with confidence is the shape of it. The fortune was substantial enough to be worth a solicitor. It was proportionate to the farm. It moved sideways from house to house rather than accumulating. And it was the only cash most farming families ever handled in a lump.

Anyone quoting precise figures should be asked where they came from.

1960. Still there, in the best land in Ireland

A survey of rural Limerick carried out between 1958 and 1964, in the richest farmland in the country, found farmers sons who could not marry even after both parents had died, because a brother or a sister was still living in the farmhouse. [2]

That is the arithmetic at its hardest. The father was gone. The land had passed. And the marriage still could not happen, because the house already held someone who had never been bought out and had nowhere else to go.

One fortune. Four children. It did not matter how good the land was.

Lisdoonvarna

One correction, since the town comes up whenever this subject does.

Lisdoonvarna grew as a spa resort on its sulphur and mineral springs, and a September gathering of farmers with the harvest behind them is a real and old thing. The organised Matchmaking Festival as it exists now is a twentieth century creation, largely built up from the 1970s. The founding date of 1857 repeated across tourism pages could not be verified in any source reached here. [3]

The matchmaking was never a festival. It was a fair day, a public house, two fathers, and a bottle of whiskey to close it.