LISDOONVARNA, Ireland — Years ago, while traveling with my family along Ireland's west coast, I spotted a curious billboard. It was blue and hot pink, and showed a man with shoulder-length hair and a gray beard smiling out from the roadside.
It was for a matchmaking festival — Europe's largest, our tour guide assured us. The man in the photo was Willie Daly, the town's resident matchmaker.
"Maybe any singles here can head to Lisdoonvarna next September to find your one true Irish love!" he declared as we drove past, earning the dull laugh for a line he had clearly delivered countless times before.
That was 15 years ago. Since then, dating has moved to apps and algorithms, to swipes and screens. But this September, I turned off the road and into the town itself to see what endures — and what has faded.
Lisdoonvarna, a village of fewer than 1,000 people, sits not far from the Cliffs of Moher, where the land falls into the Atlantic as if the world itself ends there. A single street, a scatter of pubs — and, for one month each year, a transformation as it becomes home to Europe's last great matchmaking festival.
The tradition stretches back more than 150 years, when farmers came after the harvest to find wives. Today, thousands still descend. Some are chasing romance, others just the music and the jive. But beneath it all is something rare: an almost old-fashioned earnestness. People still come here to look one another in the eye.
At a crowded hotel bar, three women from County Kerry sit watching couples dance the Irish jive, an upbeat couples dance that resembles the Lindy Hop. Geraldine Beirne, Marie Walsh and Nora O'Sullivan say they've been coming since their 20s. Now in their 60s, they still return each year. No, not for men, they insist, but for the laughter, the music — and the company. That's not to say they haven't seen romance here before.
"My sister met her husband here. My best friend met her husband here. I did meet somebody that was in my life for a while here," says Walsh.
Back then, they even remember busloads of Americans rolling into town. That doesn't happen anymore. "Since COVID, Lisdoonvarna's had a big drop," Beirne says. "The atmosphere, the whole scene changed. It has got quieter. But like that, when you're good friends, you come out and you have a ball anyway."
The three sound wistful. Yet across town, outside another bar, a younger crowd has gathered.
"I'm looking to find true love," says 30-year-old Fearghal O'Sullivan, cradling a pint of beer in hand. He means it.
"You have no real connection with Tinder, you know?" adds his friend Liam Shivers. "I want to look a woman in her eyes when I first meet her. I really believe in love at first sight."
Shivers pauses, laughs at himself. "I thought I had it once, but she said no. She said, 'Stop looking at me.'"
Later, more friends will join them for Lisdoonvarna's big Saturday blowout.
By evening, the Matchmaker Bar is almost at capacity. There's live music, dancing, and in the corner, the star attraction — Willie Daly, the matchmaker himself.
He arrives to find a crowd already waiting for him. An old friend wants only to shake his hand. Three young women sit anxiously, one having dragged friends from Spain and Dublin in hopes of finding boyfriends. "I'm sick of them complaining," she says.
Daly thinks he's in his early 80s, though he isn't sure (the town doctor wasn't much with records).
He sets up his booth in an alcove at the front of the bar. Once it had a door, but he took it off. "It was too private," he says. "Took too long to listen to everyone's story."
Now, he tapes up signs that say things like "Love Won't Wait" and spreads out his questionnaires. "What are your interests?" "What are your personal preferences for a partner?" Later, he'll go through people's responses and start making matches.
But first, he pulls out his most prized possession: a hundred-year-old ledger, passed down through three generations, bound in tape and rubber bands like some tattered spellbook.
"You don't count the seconds," he says, explaining the book's magic. "You just touch the book. You think about happiness and love. Close your eyes and think about being happy and in love, and you'll be in love and married inside the six Irish months." Which, he admits, could mean anything from six days to six years.
Over the decades, Daly says he's matched some 3,000 couples. "That never seemed many," he shrugs.
His system of fees is equally vague. Sometimes 3 euros, sometimes 40, most often 5 ($5.86). "Five euros for a husband!" he shouts, laughing.
One by one, people sit with him. He listens, nods, then scribbles a word or two across their form: "Gorgeous." "Intelligent." Once, "Pamela Anderson."
It is matchmaking, yes — but also ritual, theater, even confession. For many, just being heard is enough.
Not everyone who sits with him is single. Laura Ryan, 37, has been with a partner for 15 years but never married. "I really only want a blessing," she tells him. His advice? "Tell him you got a lot of offers."
Daly admits his own marriage did not last. "I better touch wood," he says. "You should never count what you have. They say you should never count your sheep, count your cows, count your pigs, count your money or count your wives." Still, he beams when talking about his 20 grandchildren. His father introduced him to his wife, he says proudly.
Now, his granddaughter, 25-year-old Oonagh Tighe, is ready to carry the work on.
"First thing we say is, 'Are you single?' 'Would you like a woman,' 'Would you like a man?' " she says. Tighe has already arranged her share of matches, including Patrick Mead and Angela Heavey, who met here two years ago. "She asked for our star signs," Mead recalls. "She looked it up and said, you're compatible. You're a match." They're still together, celebrating their anniversary at the festival.
Others travel much farther. Denise Almas, from Vancouver, Wash., flew in after stumbling across the festival online. "I got off dating apps three years ago. Never again," she says. "This is more normal. You're live, in person. And we need more of this. We need more community in the U.S."
Almas is not alone in that frustration. A 2025 Forbes Health poll found that 78% of dating app users in the U.S. reported frustration with them, citing ghosting, superficiality and a lack of real connection.
"Community is our culture," says Melissa Condon, a farmer from Tipperary attending the festival with her husband. "It's about meeting people, talking, telling stories."
By midnight, the party has shifted to the Ritz Hotel.
Two dance floors are going at once. There's a DJ on one side, a live band playing traditional Irish music on the other. Young and old, swirling together in the blur of it all. Not everyone — not even most — have found love. But the joy is in the gathering, and the earnest belief that they just might.
And then, just before the lights come up, Geraldine Beirne, one of the Kerry women who thought the festival's best days were long gone, finds me in the crowd.
Seventeen years a widow, she is beaming. She says she just met a man.
"A gentleman," she says, smiling. "With amazing blue eyes."
Maybe, after all, it's only the beginning.
Copyright 2025 NPR
