From PEOPLE Magazine
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He should know, given his record of ushering hundreds of couples into their own houses via holy matrimony over the past 30 years. Indeed, the farmer and third-generation matchmaker has become a must-see for many American and European visitors to Ireland's west coast—where a conservative count has men outnumbering women by five to one—and not just during the monthlong festival in September. Daly's secret is deceptively simple: "He has a lot of common sense, and he's a good listener," says friend Jim White, 60, a local hotelier.
"It's gut instinct," Daly says modestly—adding that he benefits from certain insights. "The men want a nice person and a sense of commitment," he claims. "The women want a little bit of magic."
That magic is hardly in universal supply on the first nights of the festival, which includes organized dances and horse races. "He was very sweet, but a wee bit young for me," says freelance writer Patricia Schieman, 52, a redhead from Boca Raton, Fla., after dancing an Irish reel at the Hydro Hotel with Daly-supplied partner John Cronin, 38, a Limerick businessman. But flirty couples abound too. In the lobby, Jim Maher, 55, a farmer from Tipperary, and Priscilla Coogan, 55, a retired farmer from Kilkenny, are getting acquainted. "I asked her to dance, and I'll never give up now," Maher says, nuzzling her.
At a nearby pub, J.P. Fitzpatrick, 22, a Dublin horse trainer whom Daly introduced four years ago to now-fiancée Audrey Mullen, also 22, sings the matchmaker's praises: "If it wasn't for Willie Daly, I'd just be looking at girls all night."
Indeed, "these men can be very shy," says Daly's daughter and chief assistant Marie, 24. "When they write to me, it is in dire confidence," Daly agrees (he receives about 100 letters a month, thanks to word of mouth). Eschewing a cell phone or an answering machine, Daly—who only recently began charging a nominal fee for his services—scribbles names and numbers on his office wall and tucks note cards into an oversized notebook held together with a piece of string. "He has a system," laughs Daly's daughter Sarah, 18. "It's just not high tech."
One of only two matchmakers left in the county, Daly is finding it harder to make a pairing o' the green than he used to. "Today, there are a lot of people who have come out of broken marriages," he says. "They're vulnerable, and they may be reluctant to go back into [marriage]." As a result, Daly says that his current matches wind up at the altar only about 20 percent of the time—compared with 97 percent "in the old days." What keeps him going, he says, is "when you introduce people and they get married, and you know these people had given up on the idea of finding love. Suddenly, their love has been rekindled, and that feels marvelous."
That drive befits the scion of a matchmaking family. The youngest of three children raised on a 63-acre farm in County Clare by father Henry, a farmer-matchmaker, and mother Kathleen, a homemaker, Daly left school to help on the dairy farm. At 20 he met his own wife, Marie, through the sheer luck of the Irish. "My bicycle got caught up in her horse," he recalls. Daly began playing Cupid four years later. "I was losing neighbors because the old farmers weren't getting married, so they weren't having children," he says. "That's what kicked me off."
In addition to his matchmaking duties, Daly now raises horses on the family farm and owns a pub, restaurant and bed-and-breakfast. For help, he need look no further than his own brood: Claire, 26, runs the family restaurant; Graine, 23, runs the B&B; matchmaking trainee Marie helps run the family pub; Henry, 22, is a blacksmith; Elsha, 21, works in a restaurant; Rory, 20, is a farmer; and Sarah is an actress and student. Three of the four youngest live with Daly in his modest four-bedroom house near Lisdoonvarna. Alas, he says sadly, his wife does not; the couple separated a year ago after 25 years of marriage. Daly acknowledges the irony of his situation. "I probably was neglectful," he says. "I was gone a lot, matchmaking."
Despite Daly's skill at his craft, he freely admits that some of his matches are inadvertent. On a late summer day four years ago, he agreed to meet client Paddy O'Brien, a fiftysomething farmer and musician, in a graveyard because "he was nervous of being seen," says Daly. "Two busfuls of American tourists walked in. Paddy shouted, 'Get down! Get down!' Well, I felt like a right idiot lying there, hiding.
"A young American woman bent down to stroke Paddy's dog, and he bit her on the nose. She screamed, and Paddy jumped up." The two wound up getting married one year later. Which all goes to show, Daly declares, "You can meet your likely partner in the most unlikely surroundings."
Galina Espinoza
Nina Biddle in Lisdoonvarna
- Contributors:
- Nina Biddle.
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