EMMA WALL AND Niall Mulligan were married recently in St Joseph’s Church in Ederney, Co Fermanagh by Fr Peter O’Reilly. The newlyweds and their guests then had a dramatic crossing to the reception at Lusty Beg Island Resort, when storms forced the cancellation of the usual ferry. After several hours’ delay, hotel staff managed to get all 160 guests across in small speed boats, eight at a time, to start the celebrations. “What could have ended in disaster turned out to be the best and maddest day ever - the whole episode really brought the two families together,” the groom remembers. “When Emma and I eventually arrived on the island, everyone ran down to the port and cheered. We were just drenched.”
Emma grew up in Ballinteer, Co Dublin. She went to school at St Anne’s in Milltown and to the University of Ulster at Jordanstown where she studied speech therapy. She works as a senior speech therapist at Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown. Her sisters Gina and Lynette were her bridesmaids and her brother Jeff, who lives in Colorado, gave her away. Her father, Shay, died when she was 11 and her mother, Nellie Rossiter Wall, died a year before the couple met.
Niall grew up in Roslea, Fermanagh, the son of Rosemary and Frank Mulligan. He attended St Michael’s Grammar School in Enniskillen and received an honours degree in construction management at John Moores University in Liverpool. He works in Dublin. Two of his four older brothers, Marius and Declan, acted as his groomsmen.
The couple met in Dublin one evening in September 2004, and later Emma told her sister that she thought she had met her husband. Niall proposed to her on her 30th birthday, some five years later.
The couple spent their honeymoon in South Africa.
