All for the want of a bag of chips

Published: Sun 26 Oct 2025, 12:01 PM

Sometimes arranged marriages or marriages of convenience can develop into the most charming love stories as Fr Jason Murphy describes in his latest column - Let the Busy World Be Hushed...

The five gallon earthenware whiskey jar stands bereft in the corner of the attic where it has stood for many years without whiskey to fill it nor occasion to use it. But it tells a tale from a bygone age when spraois were common in houses and a night that my granduncle took home his bride after a night of honeymooning in Dublin.

For my father remembers when he was but a boy holding the same earthenware jar on his lap on the back of a bike, his arms like ties around it, filled to the brim with the purest of plum poitin. His father cycled miles of road with the greatest care to the depths of Rafian where my grandaunt Maggie Farrelly and her husband Jack had gathered musicians and strawmen from round and about to welcome home the newly married couple from Dublin.

There was indeed great excitement for the people thought that Patsy, though a handsome man, might never marry as he had grown comfortably into his thirties and lived at home with his mother Rose beyond the crossroads at Teemore in County Fermanagh. He’d cycle up the road to the Erne Cinema in Belturbet where his nieces and nephews, at the sight of him, used to ashamedly slide down into their seats and Patsy in the front row laughing out loud and chawing on Emerald sweets.

That was until one fateful night that the Carnival came to that infamous crossroads in Co Fermanagh.

It wasn’t the carnival that drew Patsy from their little thatched cottage in Derrycannon to venture as far as Teemore that night but the want of a bag of chips that they had started selling out of a van beyond the Carnival tent with lashings of salt and vinegar. Both Mammy and he just loved the taste of these new chips so every night of the carnival Patsy would cycle the two miles to the cross to buy the chips. But by the time he got home again the chips would be cold so he’d have to fry them up with a bit more lard for both himself and Mammy.

Now Patsy never passed much remarks on having brakes on his bike so familiar he was with every turn in the road and a foot to the wheel did the job as good but how could he have foreseen that on the Friday night, when the harvest moon shone bright, that three lassies on their way to the carnival would be walking the full breadth of the road and would change the course of Patsy's life forever.

Two of the McAloon sisters were home out of England to visit their widowed father and their unmarried sister Mairead. She lived at home with her father, auld McAloon and was a good help to him about the farm, milking and foddering and making hay, as well as housekeeping. So the two English ones thought that they’d take their sister into Enniskillen and buy her a new frock by way of a treat and take her to the carnival that night in Teemore.

Mairead was well on in years by that stage and so the hope of getting her a suitor at the dance that night wasn’t part of their thinking, that was until the bauld Patsy Murphy came speeding down the brae with no brakes on his bike and wheeled into back of the them at full speed and near created carnage in the parish.

Poor Mairead lay on the broad of her back as the two sisters beat the be jaysus out of him for Mairead had broken her leg in two places and the frock was torn in tatters. She had to be carted off to Enniskillen Hospital and poor Patsy went home with a buckled wheel.

The next morning Mammy reckoned that the best thing to do was to go into see Mairead in the hospital or the priest would be down with them.

In he landed with a bottle of Lucozade and a bag of Emerald sweets to see Mairead with the leg up in the air in traction.

There, sitting on the far side of the bed with an odious look on his face, was auld McAloon. ‘Well’ says he in the fiercest of voices ‘what are you going to do about this, young Murphy?’

‘She’s no good to me now and her an invalid’.

‘What can I do about it?’ asked Patsy. 'You can marry her, that’s what you can do about it for you’re the cause of this and you can look after her,’ responded McAloon.

And so it was there and then that Patsy, like a rabbit in headlights, committed to marrying Mairead McAloon and, in the months to come, the bands were read and the match was made and my father sat on the back of a bike holding on to the five gallon jar of poitin for dear life bound for an odious spraoi in his aunt Maggie’s.

Mairead was brought home to Derrycannon and poor Mammy was banished to a wee caravan at the bottom of the garden to make way for Patsy’s new wife. And so it is that the five gallon whiskey jar stands forlorn above in the attic reminding of the night when it was brought on the back of the bike to celebrate the unlikely marriage.