Following our engagement Anne and I planned to get married as soon as might be practicable.

At that time many weddings took place at the beginning of April, a time said to be advantageous in tax terms. The most suitable date turned out to be 4 April. If there was a tax benefit due to the timing of the financial year it never seemed to register in our finances as we tried to mobilise all our resources so that we could buy a house.

Apart from house-hunting, there were many other things to be organised. Uncle George told me he could help with the purchase of an engagement ring for Anne by giving me an introduction to O’Connors the jewellers in Harold’s Cross. We chose a diamond solitaire with a trace of yellow light in it and a simple setting which would continue to look stylish over the years.

Anne gave me one of the new Super 8 movie cameras as an engagement present and the first shots taken as we took a walk along the stony Kilcoole beach feature a radiant Anne wearing her ring. Knowing well that I would never have time to edit my home movies I did my best to edit my takes as I went along. Some of my own early filming, and the footage of our wedding shot by friends, stood up quite well on the videotape to which our collection of Super-8 cassettes could be transferred more than twenty years later.

Wedding arrangements and house hunting ran in parallel in a complex countdown. The marriage was to take place in the Bray Parish Church of the Holy Redeemer on the main street, a short walking distance from both Jim and Patricia Moran’s Quinn’s Road pharmacy and the family house, St. George’s on Herbert Road. Given the status of the family in the town the bride would have to arrive with her father at the steps leading up to the church in a large hired car which would return to pick up the newly-weds.

As I was not a Catholic, and marriages in Ireland between Catholics and non-Catholics were regulated by the church’s “Ne temere” decree, Anne and I had to seek an interview with the priest who would officiate and agree that we would both sign papers promising to bring up any children of the marriage as Catholics.

We had discussed together fully and frankly all the implications of our mixed marriage and had simply decided that we would do whatever was necessary to ensure that our wedding was as happy an occasion as possible for ourselves, our parents, families, and friends. I was going through one of my agnostic phases. When Anne had been a boarder in a convent boarding school, perceptive nuns had also spotted a strand of scepticism in her practice of Catholicism.

Both of us knew there were historic precedents for making public promises with mental reservations and saw no point in making a big issue of “Ne temere”, a regulation which had undoubtedly damaged many mixed marriages and was cited as a bone of contention in Ulster Unionist criticism of what they presented as the Catholic Irish state. Most imposed ideologies wither when it becomes crystal clear that a majority of people are saying one thing and doing another. It was unfortunately to take many years before “Ne temere” withered away.

House-hunting meant both finding a suitable property and the funds to purchase it. My introduction to politics was advancing sufficiently fast that the possibility of my becoming an election candidate could not be excluded so our search concentrated within the constituency we knew. We heard that a semi-detached seaside Victorian style cottage property called Gaeta, with a secluded back garden at the bottom of Barnhill Road, near the centre of Dalkey village, might be coming on the market.

While we both felt the auctioneer was pushing the owners into the sale, the price and the site seemed excellent, although both Florence and Anne’s parents seemed a little shocked that the estate of local authority houses in which Peadar McGrane lived ran up to the cottage’s back wall. We had already learnt that there was much more neighbourliness and generosity to be found in such corporation estates than in the estates of semi-detached redbrick houses, aimed at the newly-wed and middle-class market, which were beginning to spread all over the slopes of Dalkey hill.

The purchase of Gaeta was confirmed during our honeymoon when our solicitor’s phone call got us out of bed in the luxurious Ashford Castle Hotel in Co. Mayo. The money had been raised through our own savings, gifts from Florence, Jim and Patricia, and a loan agreed between Jim and myself. It spoke a great deal about both our characters that Jim always seemed embarrassed to receive a monthly cheque covering a repayment of interest and capital over the term agreed and that I was as meticulous as any bank in calculating the monthly payments and making them on the due date.

The wedding day was great fun and went without a hitch or problem. Calvert Swanton played for the wedding, sweeping us down the aisle with Widor’s Toccata and Fugue and complaining to everyone about the terrible state of the organ. The reception in the Killiney Court Hotel, a familiar political meeting venue, was generous and done with style. Everyone laughed as I failed to cut the wedding cake, mistakenly trying to slice into one of the iced-over cardboard discs supporting the upper tiers. Jim Moran’s reputation as an outstanding after-dinner speaker was confirmed by his performance as the bride’s father. The emotion of his attachment to Anne did of course show, as did my own, when I spoke of my good fortune, paying tribute both to Anne and to Florence, whose courage and tolerance had facilitated so much.

Changing in the hotel in mid-afternoon to allow time for the journey to Ashford in daylight, we were driven to Ard Mhuire Park to collect the red Mini which had been garaged there to avoid the indignity of any “just married” treatment. The only indignity was provided by Anne’s Aunt Clara who shouted at me as Anne and I left the hotel under a hail of confetti, “Where did you get the bookie suit?”. I had thought my new thorn-proof check rather smarter than that.

What really brought us down to earth was, however, a puncture on a dangerous sloping bend as the main road west left the town of Maynooth in Co. Kildare. Anne always claimed she could see herself a widow as she tried to flag down lorries as they came into the corner oblivious of the fact that my backside would be almost under their front wheels as I worked as fast as I could to jack up the car and fit the spare extracted from beneath the honeymoon luggage.

Our budget restricted the luxury of our Ashford stay to a week. For the second week we headed north to Portnoo, Co. Donegal, where Douglas and Mary Paulin had offered us the use of their holiday bungalow. Douglas and I had become instant friends in our first contact through my Appointments Office job. He was an English schoolmaster who made his career in Belfast as the Headmaster of Annadale Grammar School, a school where pupils by family background and income might not be expected to display progressive attitudes. He succeeded in projecting a sense of citizenship and intellectual excellence. Respected by pupils, parents and anyone who had contact with Annadale, knowing that no lasting solution of Irish difficulties would be possible until mutual understanding between rival communities became the norm rather than the exception, he encouraged his sixth-formers to consider going to Trinity for their university education and, whenever he could, invited “southerners” to speak to his senior boys.

When I made the journey to Annadale, Douglas had immediately told me that Anne and I would be welcome to visit Belfast anytime or to stay in Portnoo. The IPA was equally supportive. When it became clear that Gaeta would not be ready for occupation on our return from honeymoon, we were offered the use of the apartment on Shelbourne Road retained by the Institute for visiting guests and lecturers.

No sooner did we get established in Gaeta than I was selected to be one of the Fianna Fáil local election candidates, for election to Dun Laoghaire Corporation. It was to be the first of what would be a series of unsuccessful runs in elections that never seemed to fall at a good time where my personal and professional commitments were concerned.

The yellow election posters mounted on the Mini and – like a “For Sale” notice – in the front garden of Gaeta figure in the Super 8 filming of that summer. My first ever footage as a cameraman however was of Bernard and Maura’s wedding, particularly the sequence as the bridal party left the University Church on St. Stephen’s Green to cross the road and go into the park for the wedding photo session. I caught the sunlight splashing through the white muslin of the bride’s veil as it floated in the summer breeze with her bridesmaid sisters competing to restrain it, while clutching at their own broad-brimmed soft white hats.

It still looks wonderful. Pure Agnès Varda.

Read more: 1968 – A Child is Born at a Busy Time