We had in the meantime started attending wedding fairs and the feedback was astonishing. We found people either wanted something completely personal or they simply wanted to say the right thing. That is common to all speeches because no matter what the occasion happens to be there are always some things that need to be said. The father of the bride, for instance, will always welcome the guests. The best man should always say how wonderfully suitable the bride is for his brother or his friend. So as our range of speeches grew we offered a personalised service and an off-the-shelf one. The off-the-shelf service gave three or five different speeches that could be mixed and matched, thus giving the speaker options on how to welcome guests or praise the bride.

You can never tell though how people will take what you say. We used Mary and John as example names in all our speeches. One client complained that the ready-to-go speech she bought off the shelf wasn’t about her sister Frances. Another couple were enchanted that, as they thought, we had written especially about them. How, they asked us, did we know their names were Mary and John?

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Our first orders were not, as we had expected, for ready-to-go wedding speeches. We had a request from an English teacher in Asia who wanted sample speeches to teach his children public speaking. English was not their mother tongue so the speeches would have to take that into account. They would have to be suitable for 9 year olds and the topics would have to be of interest to them. We gave him a list of suggestions on topics such as pets and holidays and he choose the ones he wanted, ordered them and we were in business. He acknowledged the speeches, said they were very suitable but never let us know how the children managed them. So perhaps somewhere in Asia there are fluent public speakers who started with very simple speeches on their dogs or their holidays! Maybe, by now, there is yet another generation of children learning the same speeches.

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If anybody asked me I would say the most important thing about our business is the personal touch. We answer every email and every query within hours. In fact one client was so impressed at getting a personal answer he immediately sent an email saying “Wow you are a real person!� In this day and age most of us are used to having answering machines take our telephone calls and automated service on the internet. It appears that we all prefer to deal with another human being. Why can’t utility companies take note?

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I was lucky. My husband believed in my abilities and he was an expert on the internet. In fact he owned an Internet company. He was selling Irish Shamrock on the Internet long before most people thought of it as a sales forum. He decided he would set up a website to sell my speeches. He would offer my ready to go wedding speeches but also offer a personalised speech service. My daughter being a drama teacher could answer any queries on speech or presentation. We had, in fact, by sheer chance, the three essentials for a public speaking business under one roof. I could write, she could coach and he could have a website designed and manage it for us. We were set up in business! That was 12 years ago and we are in business ever since.

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I was no longer afraid to speak in public but what would I do with my new skill? Having five children meant I was confined to the house a lot. One day I noticed a sign for a wedding fair. I mentioned to my friend that I could write speeches for weddings and her answer was “Do�. We made enquiries, booked a table at the fair and I went home and wrote 20 wedding speeches. My daughter, a speech and drama teacher accompanied me to the fair. My business idea was not a great success because people did not buy the speeches that day. The idea was too new and too strange. A few days later though there was a radio programme about weddings and a speaker said people should not have to give speeches at weddings because it was a nightmare for them. My daughter telephoned in and said he was trying to put us out of business before we even got properly started. The announcer thought our idea of selling speeches was a good one. She asked me to read one on air and afterwards the phone started hopping with orders for speeches. So my speechwriting venture took off the ground. That was 12 years ago now.

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Our public speaking classes were finished but by this time we were committed to it and we continued as a group for three more years. I think in that time we must have spoken about every subject under the sun. One I remember particularly was a speech on smells. Our speaker brought us on an imaginary tour of our city and spoke of the coffee shops, the smell of the river, the brewery and the scent of the grass in the public parks. In fact he had us all sniffing in our seats. Real life then intervened and our group broke up to go their various ways but each and every one of us had a lifelong commitment to public speaking and we all listened to other speakers and mentally gave them marks out of ten or so we confessed when we had occasional get-togethers.

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In our final year of publics speaking we were brought to a local school hall to learn how to use a microphone and even walking onto the stage gave us the shivers. However our teacher stood at the end of the all shouting “Can’t hear, Can’t hear� until we had mastered the art of using the microphone without deafening ourselves and everyone else. She explained that our final examination would be held in this hall before an invited audience of 500 people. We would speak in groups of four giving four different sides to a topic. Mary was more agitated then the rest of us but the teacher had chosen as her subject “Gypsies� and she spoke passionately and caringly about them and brought the roof down. Only her classmates knew that her knees were knocking. Evidently all the hard work had paid off because the night was a huge success.

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Year three in our public speaking class was harder in every way. Our teacher pushed us harder and harder and made us read more papers and listen to more items on the radio. We were all totally afraid that our impromptu subject would be something topical we hadn’t heard about. So we listened, read and discussed everything topical and a lot of things that weren’t… One impromptu speech lingers in my memory. The teacher gave our politician the subject! Christ is dead, Christ is risenâ€� The rest of us gasped but, and we then understood why he was a politician, when he said very simply,â€� Is he? I hadn’t heard but then the newspapers are on strike today.â€� It was true, they were. That’s what is called thinking on your feet!

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In the second year of public speaking our speeches got longer and more ambitious. The teacher invited other groups to come in and we would have discussions on all sorts of topics. What would you say about cutlery for instance? She taught us how to chair meetings and debates although she still didn’t approve of them. All the time she was pushing the boundaries of what we knew and how we should express it. We met groups from Toastmasters and the local seminary and it was good for us to meet public speakers who had been taught differently, and we truly believed, not as well. All this was in preparation for our first official public speaking exam.

That night there were adjudicators in our classroom and we all gave our prepared speeches and, quivering, waited for them to give us an impromptu subject. Mine was “Spies� and to this day I don’t know what I said but I know James Bond did come into it. We were given marks for content, tone, diction speed and variety. We had to wait a few months for our results but it was quite interesting to see the comments of the various adjudicators about our chosen topics and our performances in general. My chosen topic was public speaking itself and I finished with a poem about it and evidently the adjudicators liked it because I got first class honours. Finally, the fact that I was a writer had paid off!

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At the end of the first year of public speaking classes she gave us a little test. We had to give a two minute speech on a prepared subject and a one minute impromptu speech. Most of us were shaking that night but, strangely, we remembered to do our breathing exercises and we all clapped and cheered each other on. Now I know why footballers like supporters on the sideline. It does make a difference. We were all in awe at our genius though whose impromptu subject was tax. He said he felt that it was like the tithe the Christ said we should give the church and he told us that he felt it was his way of helping the widowed and the orphan. Somehow tax has never felt the same. Our teacher liked his speech but had some brusque words to say about his jacket. It was flopping open and, she said, a distraction to his audience. So he was told to button up.

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