'The European capital of jiving, courting and chat-up lines'

For those looking for love as the summer comes to a close, there's hope aplenty at the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival, writes Michael Harding

I FELT THE cold last week, in bed, and realised that the summer was almost over, so I got into the jeep and headed for Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, for the beginning of the matchmaking season.

The Matchmaking Festival is a string of weekends every September when Lisdoonvarna becomes the European capital of jiving and courting, of dreams and hopes and endless chat-up lines, and the most improbable of couples find in each other the perfect match.

I checked into a hotel on the main street and went walking around the town.

In a camper van on the Market Square, a fortune-teller, Madame Star, read palms for young women, who huddled in the porch of a nearby pub as they waited their turn.

Two men from Vietnam, with a long ladder, decorated the streets with bunting. A woman with a rucksack and wearing walking boots bought a bottle of wine and a pack of biscuits in the Spar shop, where a television was relaying Sky’s coverage of the burial of Edward Kennedy.

She glanced at the coffin on the screen, but didn’t seem very concerned, so I thought a chat-up line might be in order.

“Perhaps I should have brought my tent,” I joked, and pointed at her bottle of wine.

At the same moment, the Sky anchor-woman began describing the antics of a depraved sexual beast who kept a young woman imprisoned in his back yard for 18 years.

The woman in the walking boots looked nervous.

“Just joking,” I added quickly, “I’m much too old for camping.” She smiled and walked away.

And then it got dark.

Outside, a garda was pruning a tree in the square, to allow Madame Star park her Rimor camper van without hindering the free flow of other traffic.

And men came out of Lynch’s pub, with pints in their hands to watch and scoff.

At about 9.30pm I stepped into a small hotel, where a band was playing, a dozen couples were dancing, and a crowd sat at tables in candlelight.

A languid girl with blonde hair sipped orange juice in a corner. She wore a black woollen jumper and a chunky gold bracelet hung on her wrist; it stood out very dramatically, against the black wool.

A man in a well-ironed blue shirt and a woman in an ankle-length pink dress sat at the bar, careless of each other, like people in a solid marriage, and just there for the dancing. Two old men in shiny suits, with wrinkled whiskey noses, leaned their backs against the bar to view the dancers.

Some women had partners, and glowed with contentment. Younger women sat in groups; five or 10 at a single table, all in heels and stockings and frocks that made me breathless.

A man with white hair and bushy eyebrows danced with himself, holding a pint of stout in each hand.

A lonely boy of about 50 came in the door in trepidation; he looked shy and nervous, as if he had been lured down from the mountains with icons of the Holy Virgin, and assurances that the inviolability of his mother’s love would not be undermined by an hour of leisure in the dim lights and loud music of a Lisdoonvarna honky-tonk. He clung to his seat until the last dance, and I noticed him later, at the door, buttoning up his coat as he headed home alone.

A big, bald countryman, with arms like girders, and face muscles as flexible as bronze, placed his pint on the table next to mine, and his shoulder to my shoulder.

I said: “It’s a small crowd.” He said: “All that is in, is in. But this is only the first weekend. It warms up as September progresses. People get more frantic coming near October.” He surveyed the dancers.

“Men are like fish,” he declared. “They’re afraid to risk anything. So they don’t go into a frenzy – not yet. They mooch about for a few weekends. But come back here at the end of September and you’ll see a different story: all of them looking for swans; all of them dreaming that there’s a cure for loneliness.”

“Are you looking for a swan?” I wondered. He said: “I sort of am, and am sort of not.” “Could someone like me get a woman here?” “She’d have to fancy you first,” he declared. He had an ability to state the obvious as if he was quoting directly from the Sutras of the Buddha.

He stood up and went off looking for a dance. He endured two refusals, before a woman passing him in the aisle said, “Come on then so”, and with her on his arm, the iron man, perhaps unlettered, but deeply wise, glided across the floor, transformed, in three quick steps, into a graceful dancer.

Then a smiling happy woman of about 35, with brown hair, a grey silk dress, black tights and chunky black boots, plonked herself down opposite me and leaned into my face.

“So, what does the old man feel now?” she asked.

It took me a moment to recognise the woman I had met in the Spar shop.

“Ah,” I said, “it’s you”, as if I had known her all my life.

She grinned and asked me did I want to dance.