"Ireland is full of bachelors, all kinds of them," says Mary Carroll of Buena Park. She was born in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, and in her youth often went to the Matchmaking Festival in the town of Lisdoonvarna.
Willie Daly, from the hamlet of Ennistymon about five miles south of Lisdoonvarna, is a third-generation matchmaker by profession and agrees with Carroll's assessment. "There are loads of fellas, 78 to every woman," he says in a telephone interview, perhaps exaggerating slightly in his apparent enthusiasm to find suitable mates for the men.
"It's a tragic thing," he says. "All the men are left, because all the women have gone off to Dublin or London or America." Daly says the "fellas" who seek his matchmaking services are educated and sensitive. Plus, he says, "Irish men are attractive at the moment."
Whether they're all in the mold of Liam Neeson remains to be seen. But the abundance of single men in rural Ireland and the festival, which runs from Aug. 31 to Oct. 7, make Lisdoonvarna a destination worth considering for single American women seeking a mate. Little Lisdoonvarna is a place for stepping up to the plate.
The village of 800 is usually a sleepy place, as my sister and I discovered five years ago on a spring bike trip through County Clare. It lies near the soaring cliffs of Moher and Doolin, a traditional Irish music center and port for the ferry to the isolated Aran Islands. The Burren, a region favored by hikers and naturalists, rolls away to the northeast, dotted by prehistoric stone circles and capped by a sheet of cracked, fantastically shaped limestone that doesn't let up until Galway Bay.
The town of Lisdoonvarna grew up in the 19th century, around sulfur springs at the confluence of the Aille and Gowlaun rivers. To its purportedly healing waters and fusty Victorian hotels came those who suffered from boils, abscesses, gout and rheumatism in search of cures, not to mention tulle-shrouded females, with smelling salts in their hands.
When the turf was cut and the hay in, Lisdoonvarna was also a gathering place for local farmers. The single ones counted on matchmakers like Daly or his father or grandfather to find wives for them.
The trouble now, Daly says, is that Irish women have become very independent. "They're sitting on a fence, not looking for men as providers," he says. Where this will get them, no one knows. But it offers an Irish option to those American women, who have grown tired of fence-sitting, an Irish option.
