The Personals. Brian O’Connell

holiday. Financially, we are so much worse off since the recession, but thankfully my kids have grown up so it’s just us and the dog to look after.’

      With money tight, and having lived together for quite a while, the big spectacular wedding was not going to work out. So what did they do? ‘We flew to [the Caribbean] and got married there,’ Jean tells me. ‘We took one suitcase and the whole thing cost us €3,800 for two weeks. I left the wedding dress I bought behind and ended up buying another dress for €400 – one that I could wear on the beach because I had outgrown the first one. It was absolutely magical.’

      Feck off recession, in other words.

By the time Jean got married for the second time, she was well over 40. Her first marriage had lasted over a decade, and while she and her current husband have been married for several years, they have been together a lot longer. There’s a reason they had to wait so long to get married which I’ll come to, but looking back, Jean is now able to see clearly why her first marriage failed. ‘I was very young when I got married first time,’ she tells me. ‘Too young, to be honest. I was 19 years of age going on 20. I only knew him about eight months. My own mother got married at 17, so it was the done thing back then. I was in love and he was my first serious boyfriend.’

      Jean’s father had died when she was 17. He had still been a young man. Looking back on it she says she endured a very controlled upbringing in which her father had a strong hand in her personal life, something that’s probably totally alien to today’s teenagers. This meant she had to be in bed most nights at 9 p.m. and had very little choice to do anything socially. So when her father died, she naturally responded to her newfound freedom.