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Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
The couple were married at the old Dublin Airport terminal building.
# Love is in the air
'What a crazy day': Couple marry at Dublin Airport after Covid-19 cancels wedding plans
Nico and Justine Buhler were married today at the airport.
LOVE IS IN the air in Dublin Airport, as a couple were married in the foyer of the Old Central Terminal Building.
French couple Nico and Justine Buhler were married today at the airport, after Covid-19 restrictions disrupted their wedding plans.
This is the first time a wedding has taken place at the airport itself, as opposed to in the airport’s church.
The couple, who have lived in Ireland for 18 months, had been due to be wed on 24 April, but it was cancelled due to the pandemic. After several attempts at re-arranging the wedding and finding other locations were unsuccessful, the couple faced the prospect of their wedding licence and paperwork expiring at the end of October.
The couple appealed to Dublin Airport, to ask if the wedding could take place there. And while European law means that only passengers and staff are allowed to be in terminals, the airport did offer them the chance to get married outside the airport’s original terminal building, built in 1940.
The wet weather today forced the ceremony inside the foyer.
💑 Love is in the air: Couple marry at Dublin Airport. (Most of their friends don't know the happy news, yet...) | https://t.co/xCOnr3FgaZ pic.twitter.com/7jFlAcXxjW
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) October 4, 2020
Under Irish law, weddings must take place somewhere that is open to the public.
The ceremony was small, with only a handful of observers due to public health guidelines.
Earlier, the couple said they had just told close family and friends. Speaking to RTÉ News, they said that they wished their family could have been there.
“We can’t do that, we can’t put them at risk. So it’s a hard step to take but we had to take it,” Nico said.
“On Monday, we didn’t have a wedding planned,” he said. “I woke up on Tuesday morning. We’ve been travelling so much, airports are always open. So I took my courage and I called.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added.
“We hoped we could do it today because it’s our fifth anniversary. It’s even better to be able to do it like this. What a crazy day,” Justine said.
A spokesperson for DAA said that the airport was “delighted to help make their day special”.
“This is the 80th anniversary of Dublin Airport and it was fitting that the wedding took place in the iconic 1940s building which symbolises connecting Ireland to the rest of the world over those 80 years,” they said.
“Many of life’s events happen at the airport – we have had a birth, an engagement, we have saved over 30 lives through our defibrillator programme and today was our first wedding (that wasn’t in the airport’s church).”
