I remember a long time ago Gus Kelleher, the man from Kanturk who told the Post Mistress stories , telling me about going on holiday in the Kerry Gaeltacht in the sixties.
Himself and his wife Úna went walking by the beach of Couminole and got talking to some of the young lads hanging about there.
Gus, who was a fluent speaker of Irish , was keen to find out their pastimes and enjoyments.
One of their favourite occupations, hardly surprisingly, was to lure young ones down towards the beach in an evening.
As Gus told their story, when he asked them what they did there their reply was;
“We take off their caps and we croosh ‘em with stones.”

This I felt was a story which was not very sympathetic to the young men of the Gaeltacht.
Surely in the sixties we were capable of more sophisticated methods of courtship.

All was changed for me this morning when I was listening to Eamonn Dunphy’s surprisingly subdued interview of Professor Niamh Brennan, she happens to be the wife of our own Tainiste Michael Mc Dowell.

She describes their courtship, also in the sixties, in mainly similar terms.
When Eamonn asked how they met, her description was at a party when they were both working on the campaign of Adrian Hardiman to be elected as president of the Students Representative Council.
“I sat next to him” ( Mc Dowell) she said and “eventually he asked me to go away as I was annoying him”.
“When I refused” (Yes!) “he threatened to pour beer over me if I stayed”.
She stayed, he poured.
“Then” she said in the interview without turning a hair “he realised I was serious”!
I can‘t quite decide whether I think this was a good or a bad decision.
Certainly a weird way to start a marriage though.