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Internally, the pages and page block ends are age tanned heavily, but binding is tight, the book is clean and unmarked,
Dan Paddy Andy O'Sullivan, from the Stacks Mountains in Kerry, was a legendary matchmaker whose memory has been kept alive in the writings of John B. Keane.
John B got to know Dan Paddy Andy when he spent his childhood summers with relations in the Stacks Mountains, and it was in the Stacks Mountains that John B. learned the ballad, The Road to Athea, a verse of which he often quotes.
We arrived in Athea at a quarter to one
And up to the clergy we quickly did run;
'Twas there we were married without much delay;
And we broke a bed spring that night in Athea.
The marriage was more than likely the work of Dan Paddy Andy. Perhaps the couple met in his dance hall in Renagown, which he insisted in opening during Lent in the 1940s despite the Catholic Church ban. The clerical displeasure was intense and he was denounced from the altar. "There is a wild animal after descending from the mountains and it is the man of the triple name, Dan Paddy Andy," a priest declared. There was a midnight visit to his house from two priests - although it was later claimed that they were imposters - in the summer of 1943. They ordered him to his knees and sought a sworn undertaking that he would never again open his dance hall during Lent. Dan Paddy Andy, a physically strong man, knocked their heads together and sent them running.
He was not to be beaten. He struggled on and in time diversified into holding supper dances, the food on offer being tea and bread and jam. In later years, he attracted considerable media attention, and the intrepid television reporter Alan Whicker was among those who came to see him. According to John B., the matchmaker supreme observed that Whicker was a bachelor and advised him to visit the holiday resort of Ballybunion if he wanted to meet a virgin.
