Men of Ireland, the bar has been raised.
Last week, you may have read about one of the most romantic engagement proposals we’ve certainly ever seen or heard of, when Galway man Shane McInerney asked the love of his life, Julia Gordon, to marry him on a beach in Florida.
We didn’t think it would be topped, or at least we thought it would be a long time until we heard of a better one, yet, just one week later, the bar has been raised even higher again.
In Ballina in Tipperary at the weekend, Padraig Hickey asked his girlfriend of seven years, Joanne Minogue (who lives just three fields over from the Hickey house), to marry him under a candlelit bridge with cascading waterfalls in front of both of their families, having used a classic agricultural excuse to lead her to the special location in the first place.
We’ll let Padraig’s brother John take up the story.
We managed to get her (Joanne) up to the location by convincing her and my brother that the cattle had broken out in one of the fields on Saturday evening and needed to be brought down.
So my brother took off running in his wellies to the bridge, claiming he would be able to round up the cows on his own… only to then ring me to say ‘eh, you will need to go the other way to get them’.
So Joanne and I started our walk through a river and up a valley looking for non-existent cows until we got out the other side of the valley…
From here then, she spotted the bouquet of flowers at the top of a descent into the river, where he had put LED lights over a picture trail, where she then had to walk up to meet him waiting under the bridge for her.
The pictures do the proposal plenty of justice, but John also managed to record a short video of the sequence of the events when Joanne started to realise there was something going on…
Padraig & Joanne get engaged! from Johnjameshickey.com on Vimeo.
Much as we admire your efforts Padraig, we can’t help but think that there are thousands of men out there watching this through gritted teeth with their better halves in the realisation that a bog standard proposal simply won’t cut the mustard.
Cheers to John Hickey for sending this our way. If you have something you would like to share with us, send it to [email protected] or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
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