I Do!: Brenna Shine and Kevin Rugg

Brenna Shine had just returned to Long Island from a stint as a traveling nurse in San Diego when she met her future husband, Kevin Rugg, at The Black Sheep Ale House in Mineola.

“We met walking into the bar, and he held the door open for me. That’s how we started talking,” Shine, 30, recalled.

The pair began dating after that October 2018 evening. They got engaged Nov. 18, 2022, while on a joint family trip to Ireland.

The proposal was unexpected, Shine said. Rugg, 34 and an FDNY firefighter, had told her the ring hadn’t arrived in time for the trip. “It’s going to happen soon, he told me, but not in Ireland,” she said.

They were walking along the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare when he proposed. “We were walking with our families and taking lots of pictures, with people switching in and out of the photos. As I was walking, he called to me, and when I turned back, he was down on one knee,” she said. “You told me it wasn’t happening this trip!” Shine said she responded, before saying yes.

The vacation was so memorable that when it came time to plan their wedding, Shine said, “We thought, ‘Why not have an Irish wedding?’ ”

They celebrated their July 12 nuptials with 80 guests, including 13 Irish family members, in Killarney. “I have a lot of family ties there, my dad is from Cork, and I’ve visited 10 times,” Shine said. “We had perfect weather, too — there was no rain that week.”

Most guests arrived four to five days before the wedding. They spent time visiting Killarney National Park and taking a boat tour of its glacial lakes; sightseeing in the town of Killarney; and taking horse-drawn “jaunting cars,” two- or four-wheeled carts, through the Gap of Dunloe, a scenic pass.

“We wanted to make it laid-back, more like a vacation, because we knew it was a lot,” Shine said. “We rented a bus to transport everyone and had open bars.” Another group destination was the Jameson distillery in Cork, along with Spike Island in Cork Harbor.

Shine said the wedding was all she’d dreamt of: “It was so much love in one day.”