It was a half-hour ceremony and there were cheers and Dolly Parton's 1972 hit "Touch Your Woman" was played to mark the occasion. Shannon Sickels and Grainne Close posed for the cameras and then hurried away to a reception as family, friends and gay rights activists threw flowers and brightly coloured ribbons.
"This is about making a choice to have our civil rights acknowledged and respected and protected as any human being," said Shannon Sickels, 27, who met her 32-year-old partner in New York four years ago.
However, in keeping with the staunch conservatism of Northern Ireland, the wedding, which will go down in history for being the first of its kind, caused a protest from some evangelists who sang hymns and displayed placards that stated, "Sodomy is sin."
But gay rights campaigners waved placards reading: "Earth is flat. Bring back slavery."
"The fact is that God instituted human marriage in the Garden of Eden, and it was one man with one woman. God has not changed that," said Rev. Ian Brown of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, a fundamentalist branch of the church founded by Northern Ireland's Protestant politician, Ian Paisley.
But the protesters had dwindled away by the time the second civil partnership couple, Belfast gay men Christopher Flanagan and Henry Kane, had arrived in a pink limousine.
Christopher Flanagan said the new law would protect them, ensuring that if one died, the other would inherit any property rather than relatives who were opposed to their relationship. "It's given us legal status behind our relationship, if anything goes wrong," he added.
