Whoever turned weddings into a competitive sport?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

here are many ways to make your wedding day special; you can go for the tried and trusted of being surrounded by family and friends as you make a lifelong commitment to the person you love more than life itself – or when the time is precisely right, you can have an owl swoop overhead with the rings.

You can have the bridesmaids and best men choreographed to produce a spontaneous Riverdance that will ensure your big day gets loads of hits from people who’ve never heard of you, on YouTube.

You can gallop up the aisle holding hands on matching white steeds if it suits you – and before all of that, you can go on a three-day stag break to Las Vegas to play Blackjack and lose the price of a decent-sized family house.

The day the worm turned was when they invented wedding planners – as though you didn’t have the smarts to organize your own big day.

There are good wedding planners of course who do nothing more than facilitate your vision and smooth out all of the wrinkles that could otherwise take all of the good out of the day before you’ve even said ‘I do’.

But there are also those who do not know where to stop – the ones who have doves to release afterwards or the dogs to carry up the rings on a specially-made collar or who tog the wedding party out like a multi-coloured meringue.

Rory McIlroy’s recent nuptials saw Ashford Castle and a sizeable portion of the northern end of Lough Corrib cordoned off from us little people but at least he’s a multi-millionaire golfer who is only dipping ever so slightly into his enormous pool of cash.

Sporting legends can afford to have Stevie Wonder just calling to say he loved them, as well as a fleet of helicopters to make sure the Ryder Cup team doesn’t get stuck in traffic around Clonbur.

But there are other mere mortals who cannot afford the rent on a house – let alone a mortgage – who still rack up bills running to tens of thousands for a day that many of those in attendance will do well to remember by the time the first anniversary comes around.

The phenomenon of competitive weddings mean that no longer can you just have a ceremony followed by a choice of beef or salmon, a dodgy Country & Western band and a mobile disco topped off by three intermittently flashing coloured lights.

For more, see this week’s Connacht Tribune.