It started behind the goal-posts at a Gaelic football match in Paris and ended up on a slow train to Bagenalstown.
The Iarnrod Eireann executive train became a wedding train yesterday, taking the party from a church in Malahide, Co Dublin, to the reception in Co Carlow.
The father of the bride, Mr Pat Cranley, train locomotive driver for Iarnrod Eireann, and his friends joked that he should hire the executive train for the wedding. The last time the press stepped on to the train, which costs up to £6,000 a day, was when John Bruton used it during his election campaign.
The bride, Lisa Cranley, met her French husband, Pascal Theis, when he played goalie for the Lyons Gaelic football team in Paris. "We were behind the goals and he kept letting them in and we were slagging him."
As for using the train on her wedding day, "I thought it was the strangest idea, but a wonderful one. Once the idea came up, we had to go somewhere where the train could go." Hence the reception in Bagenalstown.
Pat did the figures, and reckoned it would be a good way to show the 50 or so French guests the Irish countryside, which rushed past the windows in all its summer glory. The French pronounced the whole thing formidable as they sat down to afternoon tea of scones and custard creams. Soup and sandwiches awaited them for the return journey in the early hours of this morning.
The train usually caters for corporate entertainment and visiting tour operators.
A spokesman for Iarnrod Eireann, delighted with the publicity, said the train had been turned into a casino by one company. Once a priest had said Mass from behind the bar for a group travelling down to the Munster hurling final. "We checked if the train driver had the same power as a sea captain to marry people, but unfortunately he doesn't."
