I should have known I was heading for a bureaucratic nightmare when I made the first phone call to the Marriage Registrar. I explained that I would like to get married. I understood we had to give three months' notice, and could she tell me how to go about it?
"Fine," she said. "Has either of you ever been married before?"
"Yes, we're both divorced." (Oh, the naivete of this answer!)
"I see," she said. "And what country did you get divorced in?"
"The UK. I was living in London. I got divorced in 1980."
"I see," she said. "And where were you born?"
"Singapore."
"And what nationality are you?"
"Irish."
She didn't say "Oh dear," but it felt as if she might. She tried a new tack.
"What about your husband? Where was he born?"
I wondered if she'd think I was pulling her leg: "Mexico."
"And where is he living now?"
"Mexico City."
"And where was he living at the time of the divorce?"
"Can't remember." London or Mexico? It was a long time ago and we'd been living apart for a while.
Marriage laws
The woman in the Marriage Registrar's office then explained why I had been asked all these questions.
"You see," she said, "even though we have introduced divorce in Ireland, we haven't actually changed our marriage laws. Not many people realise this."
It took a while to sink in. What she meant was that the conditions under which divorced people are allowed to remarry in Ireland remain the same as they did before the divorce referendum. That is, they remain extremely stringent in order to discourage people from taking up residency abroad simply to get a divorce, then moving back to Ireland and remarrying.
As far as I can gather, Irish marriage law recognises a foreign divorce only if one of the partners to that divorce still lives in the country in which the divorce was issued.
So if the ex and I had a Mexican divorce, that would be fine, as he is still living in Mexico. Our UK divorce was not apparently worth tuppence as neither of us still lives there.
But we did at the time, I repeated, or rather I certainly did at the time. I can prove I didn't move to Ireland until 1983.
Not a hope in hell. Unless, perhaps, my ex-husband had legalised our UK divorce in the Mexican courts? Did we by any chance have a Mexican divorce?
"No. We thought one was enough."
"There's another possibility," she said. "You could try and get an Irish divorce, but I couldn't say for certain if you'd qualify because it's early days yet, and the legislation is still a little, er . . ."
"Absolutely out of the question," I said. I could hear a sigh of relief from the Registrar's office.
Matter of principle
It was a matter of principle. How could I, who have been under the illusion for the past 17 years that I am divorced, suddenly have to pretend to be married again in order to redivorce at God knows what cost and delay simply because the Irish legal system refuses to recognise my perfectly good English divorce?
I must stress that at every stage of this weird conversation, the person in the Marriage Registrar's office was unfailingly helpful. We even had a couple of laughs. I felt that she was there to help me find a way around a legal absurdity, that it was her job to foresee any objections that the Registrar might put to my request to be married in the Irish State so that eventually I might be able to do so.
If I was still in touch with my ex-husband (or is he still my husband?), perhaps we could try a different tack, she suggested. If he was prepared to swear an affidavit in front of a notary public saying that he was living in Mexico City and had no intention of moving to Ireland, that might do the trick.
Would not the fact that he has remarried, and has three children, and has lived and worked in Mexico City for the past 17 or so years without so much taking a holiday in Ireland be proof enough of his intentions to stay where he is?
Well of course not. We're dealing with the law here, and the law, in this case at least, in my opinion, is an ass.
I haven't actually spoken to my ex-husband since he left London in 1979 or 1980 or whenever, but we still have a few friends in common. One of these happened to be in Kinsale while I was having this delightfully Kafakesque phone conversation with the Marriage Registrar's office, and he volunteered to have a chat with my ex when he got back to Mexico City.
Glad to help
That was the lowest point of the whole process. The ex, luckily, was reported to have "una disposicion magnifica". He would be glad to help. He went off to a notary public to swear his answers to a list of questions provided by the Marriage Registrar's office, and along with his birth certificate, these went on to a certified translator. My friend then sent the papers to me and I took them to the Marriage Registrar's Office to make sure they were in order.
Only at this point was it spotted that I had been born in Singapore while it was still a British Colony. I was therefore technically British-born, and my English divorce would probably do. We sent the whole package on to the Registrar General, just to be on the safe side.
It worked. I was married in Dublin on November 20th. I was lucky. But it still amazes me that an Irish citizen, a bona fide divorcee, domiciled in Ireland, who wants to get married, should have to go through such a farcical procedure. The marriage laws seem designed primarily to catch out those who would evade them by setting up token residence abroad in order to get a divorce. Those days are over. We now have Irish divorce. Surely it is time that Irish marriage laws were up-dated so that they help people who want to get married, rather than hindering them.