It's like a plot from a romantic movie — boy meets girl on a bus but after their brief encounter they go their separate ways because she’s in a relationship.
Years pass but he’s still on her mind. When she becomes single, her sister contacts a radio show in the hope of tracking the boy down.
The appeal is answered, the pair meet, they fall in love and end up getting married.
It may sound like a Hollywood film plot but this is the real-life story of Hazel O’Donnell (29) and Simon Sheridan (33).
Yesterday the couple got married at the Glenview Hotel in Co Wicklow, where Simon grew up, seven years after that first meeting on the Dublin to Cork bus. And it all came about with the help of a 2008 appeal on
Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy show. Yesterday Ray and his co-star and fiancee Jenny Kelly were celebrating news of the wedding on their show.
Ray told listeners “It’s a beautiful story and one that Jenny is very proud in a Cilla Black sort of way.” And it was a Hollywood movie that played a part in Hazel and Simon’s reunion. Three years after they first met, Hazel, a nurse from Mitchelstown, Co Cork, found herself single and couldn’t get Simon off her mind.
“He was just like this fly that wouldn’t go away,’ she joked yesterday. “I used to sit thinking ‘I’d like to meet him again’, but I didn’t know what to do.” After Hazel and sister Kim watched the 2001 movie
Serendipity — about a couple (John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale) who reunite years after meeting — Kim thought it would be a great idea to try to contact Simon through the Ray D’Arcy Show.
The email was read out on the show in May 2008 and among the clues they had to track Simon down was that he was moving to England to study music therapy and he had “the most beautiful blue eyes”. Dara, a friend of Simon’s sister Louise, was listening to the show and got in touch with Simon.
A few days later Hazel and Simon spoke for the first time in years and after meeting up just a few times Simon turned to Hazel and said: “We are going to get married, aren’t we?” Yesterday, the fairytale came true.