Brother, sister who had child together to wed

LONDON - A brother and sister who had a child together have planed to get married, breaking the law which restricts incestuous wedding, British media reported Sunday.

The pair first spoke to the Irish Mail newspaper in May about their shock when they learned that they shared a father.

Although, the couple - known as James and Maura - realise it is illegal for them to marry, they are determined to spend the rest of their lives together and will break the law to do so.

According to the Daily Mail, the couple, whose identities the Irish Mail has protected by changing their names, as well as those of their relatives, spoke about their wedding plans this weekend.

“We have applied to get married and there are no mistakes in the paperwork so we will be able to wed at the end of this month,” James said.

“We were aiming for Christmas but we have decided to do it sooner. Maura has got her wedding dress, we’ve ordered identical suits for myself and our son. We’ve also ordered a cake and we plan to go on a honeymoon a few weeks after the wedding.

The story made headlines around the world, when James and Maura revealed how they met and fell in love completely unaware that they shared a father.

The couple, who hailed from different towns, about 100 miles apart, were both out with friends when they met in a nightclub in a third town several years ago. Just a week after meeting, they both felt they had known each other for a lifetime.

Two years later, Maura became pregnant and the couple moved in together. Later that year their son, Mark, was born. By then James’s fraught relationship with his mother, Carmel, was nearing breaking point.

He had not seen Vincent - the man he had been brought up to call “father” - for several years. Vincent, with whom James had a strained relationship, had left the family home when James was aged about 10 or 11.

Maura, who had enjoyed a happy family background, encouraged James to make peace with his estranged mother. A few days later, Carmel revealed that Maura’s father was also James’s own father.

Since Christmas, with the help of DNA tests and gentle questioning, James and Maura have discovered that on a night out in the 1980s, Carmel, then aged 19, met Tom, and the pair dated for four or five weeks before going their separate ways.

However, after discovering she was pregnant with James, Carmel opted not to tell Tom she was expecting his child. By the time James was born, she was in a relationship with Vincent, and it was he who she named as James’s father on the baby’s birth certificate.