The Drunken Matchmaking Festival That's Like an IRL Tinder

Lisdoonvarna is home to approximately 740 people, but in September the village expands by over 100 times as 80,000 people attend the five-week long Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival. It attracts singletons between 18 and 80 years old from all over Ireland (and a contingency from elsewhere). Every day of the month, from 11AM to 2AM, 15 venues across the one-street town offer dancing – predominantly jive, set-dancing and whatever you do to wedding-pop. In the age of dating apps, "girlfriend experiences" and Ashley Madison, the event seems an extraordinary anachronism.

Lisdoonvarna now bills itself as both a matchmaking and a country-western music event. In recent years, jive dancing has had a notable resurgence among young people in rural Ireland, but show bands and country music have long been a part of the festival because that kind of music lends itself to the set dancing.

"Dancing is a big connector," says Julie Carr, who has done the marketing and PR for the festival for the last six years. The dancing – I am told over and again – and the craic are what bring the thousands of people and facilitate the romance. "People really do come for love," says Julie. "It's that kind of eternal hope. Lisdoonvarna is a time warp. It's as if time has stood still."

A third generation "traditional Irish matchmaker", Willie Daly is the face of Lisdoonvarna, and maker of over 3,000 matches. Every time I called to see where he was or when suited to meet for our interview, he assured me that he had a man for me who was tall and handsome from the back.

Along the road to the village you will see his white-bearded face on colourful billboards, and on the roads to his home in nearby Ennistymon, you will see his hand-painted signs. They read variations of "Donkey Farm Matchmaking Museum" because Willie's house, next door to the one in which he was raised, is a donkey farm as well as his matchmaking home-office. During the festival he sets up in a snug in The Matchmaker Bar on the main street. His face – or, rather, his saintly icon – is also painted on this bar. Willie is depicted in front of two angels, holding his matchmaking ledger book the way Jesus held lambs.

I am welcomed into Willie's kitchen, which has the bric-a-brac feeling of a pub, and sat down with a cup of tea. At around 76 years old (the priest who kept the records is no longer alive), Willie is one of those people with whom eye contact never reaches the point of discomfort.

The first thing Willie shows me is the form his clients fill out when they join his service. Many of his clients sign up in person during the Matchmaking Festival, and afterwards he goes through and considers pairings. Additional matchmaking correspondence happens year-round through letters, phone calls, and some emailing. For his services, he charges €10 to €15, the cheaper rate for the ladies. At the festival, he says, young women will be in his office earlier in the night, while the men come later, "covering it all up with a few whiskeys".

Clients give the date, their name, birthday, birth location, address, telephone numbers, email, occupation, car registration, marital status, number of children, a general list of hobbies and interests and, of course, preferences for a partner.

"I'd be very much a visual person," Willie explains. "Finding partners for people so that their body would fit together more than their minds. That's why the form is so simple. You could write a thousand things and none of it would matter if you're confronted with someone that you're physically attracted to."

I discover later that questions which were removed from the form include: "What do you think is the main difference between men and women?" "How would you deal with someone who wanted passion before you did?" and "Do you encourage people to talk to you by eye contact, a smile or body language?" All of these seem like good, timeless queries to me, so I'm curious about what Willie has changed in his practice. As a third-generation matchmaker, what secrets about love did his father pass down?

"He never said a word about it, but I'd seen it – I grew up with it," says Willie of Henry. Willie partook in the cattle fairs that, in Henry's day, were where the matches were made.

Part and parcel of the matchmaking was the custom of giving a dowry – usually livestock – which continued in rural Ireland until the 1970s. The Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival falls in September because that's right after the harvest, and back in the day the farmers would arrive flush with cash and cattle, and prepared to negotiate a match. "If a girl was good-looking, the dowry could be very small, maybe one pig," says Willie. "And if a girl wasn't so good-looking, the dowry would have to be bigger. Say, three fat pigs."

Willie's perception of male and female relations is rooted in a different era and way of life, but his matchmaking has carried through the decades. He continues working with young people, and he says matters of the heart are a timeless thing. Perhaps because of this mix, his conception of modern romance is confusing.

"Now the clock has swung back around," he says. "It has changed back to the way it was about 50 years ago. I'm listening to people of late in their twenties and up to mid-late thirties, not gonna leave it too much longer – they want kids and they want family life."

Transactional and arranged marriages exist in various forms in many cultures, but few have been as romanticised as the twinkly eyed Irish matchmaker. Willie still carries the original matchmaking ledger used by his forefathers. The brown leather tome held together by several rubber bands and stuffed with extra paper, some dating from the 1850s and some annotated with LOL – which is not a matchmaker's scorn, but short for "lots of land".

The book seems to be more talisman than tool, though, and Willie doesn’t do things the same way as his father and grandfather. What people want has gone through many cycles over the course of his tenure. The need-driven matchmaking of 100 years ago can't be extrapolated to today. The question, then, is: if the festival and matchmaking still exist, to what degree do the legacies of the historical conditions affect modern love lives in rural Ireland?

One young woman from Dublin who I meet later at the festival tells me that Americans are always asking her what the dating culture is like in Ireland. "I tell them we don’t have one<' she says. "Irish men will never make a move. I’d say they’re pretty emotionally repressed. Irish guys are out for the shift, but they don’t have a lot of game." (A "shift" is a make-out session, or a snog, in American and British parlance, respectively.)

When Willie explained the ways of the Irish romantics, it was difficult to not find his mysticism intoxicating. "To be living on an island," he began, casting a hand in the air, "which of course is a wonderful thing, people have developed a particular kind of way of life. Irish people are very gentle, often in many cases very quietly spoken. Irish people have a lot of nature in them. And they kind of end up loving everybody. The men aren't afraid of romance – they're shy. They say there's nobody as romantic as an Irish man with a good few drinks in him. Half the people in Ireland wouldn’t be married if it wasn't for whiskey and Guinness."

In fairness, drinking is a part of dating culture the world over, so the Irishman's need for liquid courage is not unique. The difference is that they seem to take a lot more of it, and they certainly fill up at the festival. A huge proportion of farming men come every year, including a whole farmer's association, all aged between 18 to 25. From Limerick, Tipperary, Kerry and around Clare, men come in groups sometimes as large as 20, in camper vans seemingly unhindered by the laws of physics. An American woman remarking on the hundreds of vans parked up and down the hill of the town asked me, "Those things are so tiny, where do they shower?" and in asking, answered her question.

On Saturday night the Matchmaker Bar is feverishly warm, and wall-to-wall with people. What can be seen of the floor is shining with drink swill. The humidity rises palpably as we weave through to the dance floor. One man kicks me in the knee four times, bouncing with glee. The band, Outta Diesel, have worked the crowd into a pinwheeling mania, and when the excitable intro of "Proud Mary" begins and a cheer goes up, Reyna and I tunnel a retreat, the hands over our heads useless against the liquid raining down from glasses above.

We pop into The Ritz Hotel – not the Carlton – and, in the glow of purple fairy lights, people between 50 and 80 are holding hands in lines and performing a dance they all know. We leave, and settle into Meg Maguire's, a nearby pub.

There, we meet Liam, leaning back against the bar in a maroon crewneck sweater. I tell him I'm writing about the festival. He asks for who and rolls his eyes indulgently when I give the name of this publication. Liam is from Limerick, has come with a group and has a girlfriend, so no, he says with a smile that suggests otherwise, he's not here to meet someone.

"People don't really come here to meet people," he says. "And Lisdoonvarna isn’t Ireland."

He seems convinced that I'm going to write some fluff piece about how charming everything is, a PS I Love You: Lisdoonvarna. He says that young people came to party, to drink, yes, to meet people, but not to meet wives and husbands. Hook-up culture exists here like anywhere else. Ireland isn't the cute little country they put in the movies.

"Okay," I says, "but if people can do that anywhere, why come all the way here?"

Because, says Liam, the success rate at Lisdoonvarna is still considerably higher. Because here, the guys can approach girls – the girls expect them to.

The sober timidity that Willie described in Irish men comes to mind – and Liam is of course right. That said, his take makes it sound like a festival where the guys have formal permission to get really drunk and hit on women. He's not wrong. But that's not the whole story.

When we meet Patricia she speaks breathlessly about Lisdoonvarna with an unusual mix of blunt realism and flowery romanticism: "The festival and Willie's matchmaking had to ride dramatic socio-economic changes in Ireland. Willie was smart. During the Celtic Tiger he sold the bachelor farmers as rich, more glamorous men. During the crisis, they were good, wholesome men with land. Since it's become more acceptable for older women to date younger men, he's selling on the cougar idea."

Then she adds, "Willie is an amazing man. He's living the life of love in his head all the time. Lisdoonvarna is like nowhere else. It's like Las Vegas, but instead of gambling all day, it's love all day."

There is international attendance, but this manifests in a disproportionate number of American women, as opposed to American men or people of other nationalities. Almost everyone is white. I did speak to three Zimbabwean women who were standing at a safe distance from the crowds pouring out of the pubs, but they were asylum seekers who arrived in Lisdoonvarna under Ireland’s "direct provision" policy.

Ahead of the festival I got in touch with an American woman named Trina from Alabama through the official Lisdoonvarna Facebook group. She and her friend had decided to incorporate a weekend of the festival into their week-long trip to Ireland.

"I am single. I'm really going to have fun," said Trina. "When you’re a little older, it’s hard to have fun." Trina described herself as a young 50. She had been on dating apps but didn't like them: "When people don’t pay for something, they feel like they’re gonna get something for nothing."

She didn't know too much about the festival except that there was a third generation matchmaker and that farmers attended. "I don’t know how many farmers actually go. I think it's kinda sweet, though, straightforward," she said. "With that kind of music, that will bring a different kind of person." When I met Trina at the festival, her takeaway about Irish men was that they were "more polite".

On my last day at Lisdoonvarna I receive an email from Julie telling me that Willie's daughter Elsha Daly will be taking over as the official matchmaker in the coming years. Would I like to meet her?

Elsha arrives at our interview in a blazer and jeans, and swathed in a pastel-coloured silk scarf. She tells me she has plans to do things differently than Willie. She wants her matchmaking service, which is in its nascent phase, to be more contemporary. Her father primarily operates on paper (Willie's website domain expired sometime in September). Elsha's service, which costs €250 for the year, begins with a two-page form in which clients fill out their interests, occupation, values, astrological sign, number of children, what they’re looking for in a partner, and describe their five-year plan and relationship history to date. She then proceeds with extensive conversations over the phone or in-person if possible. Clients are guaranteed three first dates, and Elsha doesn’t provide any individual with photographs ahead of the date. She might connect them and let them arrange things themselves, or if they need a little more handholding, she will step in and set it all up.

It's a little after noon on the last Sunday of the festival and, on Tuesday, Elsha tells me, the place will be a ghost town.

There are several narratives of Lisdoonvarna, and all of them are true. There is the genuine, sincere place to come to line and set dance and meet the person you'll marry. There is the piss-up that rages for an entire month. There are, still, the young people from the rural West. There are the city folk frustrated with Tinder. There are what my Airbnb host calls "September people", AKA the divorced and the still-married. There are the men, young and old, boisterous with the drink, and the women, young and old, relishing the 10:1 ratio of men to women, and a chance to be more predatorial. Trina, the woman from Alabama, told me, "If this festival took place in America, someone would get shot."

"Every year, the festival gets bigger," says Elsha, flicking her scarf and leaning forward in her armchair. "This is an event that can grow. There is money to be made here. Lisdoonvarna can get bigger. It can get better. And it will."

@lucieshelly