Slides That Follow Your Voice: Irish Accent Wedding Speech

Slide 1: Hannah and Dermot

0:17Good evening, everybody. For those who haven't met me, I'm Clare, Hannah's older sister, which means I've known the bride for thirty-one years and four months, and I've been waiting about thirty of them for a microphone and a room that can't leave. [laughs]

0:32Before I start, a few thank-yous, because my mother is watching hello, Mam, and she has a list. Thank you to the staff here at Ballinroe House, who've fed a hundred and forty people without a single one of them complaining, which in this family is a kind of wonder.

Slide 2: Thank you

0:49Thank you to Dermot's parents, Frank and Josephine, who drove down from Letterkenny in the rain and still look better than the rest of us. And thank you to my father, who said he wouldn't cry, and who is at the moment pretending to look for something under the table. [laughs]

1:05Now. Hannah.

1:09When Hannah was seven she decided she was going to be a vet. He's still at it. There's nothing under there. He did the same thing at my wedding, and at Hannah's graduation, and at a christening once that wasn't even for anyone we knew, and, anyway, Dad, we can all see you. Right. The vet. She was so sure of it that she set up a clinic in the garden shed, with a sign, a waiting room made of upturned buckets, and a uh... a receptionist, who was me, aged ten, and who wasn't consulted.

Slide 3: She was going to be a vet

1:42Over one summer she treated two cats, a guinea pig, no, a hamster with a limp, a jackdaw that bit her, and our neighbour's dog, Rusty, who had nothing wrong with him and just liked the attention. She charged twenty pence a visit. Twenty pence. Rusty's owner paid in biscuits, which she took, because she was seven and they were good biscuits. I don't know if that's where the accounting started. It might be. By September she had three pounds sixty in a jam jar and a scar on her thumb from the jackdaw, and she said the clinic had been a success, and nobody argued with her.

Slide 5: 3 pounds 60 in a jam jar

2:19She isn't a vet. She's an accountant, which she says is the very same thing, except the patients are spreadsheets and none of them bite. No? Okay. Sure look, she laughed.

Slide 6: She's an accountant

2:31But I say, I tell, the reason I tell... But I tell that story because the girl in the shed is still here. Whatever Hannah decides to do, she does it the whole way, with a sign on the door and a jar for the takings.

2:46And then there was Dermot. They met, as most of you know, on the number forty-six bus, which broke down on the Stillorgan Road in January twenty nineteen, in the rain, uh... obviously. Forty strangers stood under a shelter built for twelve.

Slide 7: The number 46 bus

3:02Dermot, being Dermot, went and bought coffee for everybody in the queue, came back with two cardboard trays, and handed the last cup to the girl at the end who was pretending to read. She told me that night she'd met a man who was either a saint or a lunatic, and that it was too early to say which.

3:20It's been nearly seven years, Dermot, seven years, Dermot, and I'm still not sure she's decided. [laughs] He's nodding. He has no idea what I said, he's had three glasses of the good stuff, but he's nodding, and that, Hannah, is a husband.

3:37What I am sure of is this. I've watched my sister with a lot of people over the years. I've never watched her be quieter with anyone.

3:48She doesn't perform for him. She's just Hannah, and he's just delighted about it, every day, and that's about all any of us are looking for, I think. [sighs] I had a better line for this. It's on a card. I've lost the card.

Slide 8: She doesn't perform for him

4:06So. Would you all stand, please, if you can, and lift whatever you have in front of you.

Slide 9: To the girl in the shed, and the man with the coffee

4:13To the girl in the shed, and the man with the coffee. To Hannah and Dermot.