Hello Curious Aussie,
I went to www.rootsireland.ie and searched for a marriage record for Michael Feeley and Bridget Brady but to no avail. It's possible they married in Australia.
I did however find a marriage record for Michael Brady married to Bridget Farrelly. They married in the parish of Castlerahan in Co. Cavan in 1818. It's possible your birthdates may be a little off. I went to the Cavan genealogy site to see what records there are and how far back they go, but the site doesn't have them all listed yet.
However ,some good news. As you may know all the census returns countrywide from 1821 until 1901 were destroyed in a fire in the four courts in 1922. This has made genealogy almost impossible here in Ireland. Church records started around the 1820's onwards. Only very old towns had any records going back to 1790 or so. Civil registration started in 1864.
However on the day of the Fourcourts explosions, a few fragments of census were taken out of the library and in the reading room. Part of Cavan is one of those fragments to survive, and the parish of Castlerahan is one of the parishes. These records are now in the National Archives in Dublin. So many people would love to be able to access census records going so far back.
Anyway, keep an open mind regarding birth dates. If these were taken from tombstones etc, there's agood chance they are incorrect.
Most people who emigrated were illiterate and undocumented. They didn't know how to spell their names and hadn't a clue as to what age they were. At the port of arrival their names were recorded phonetically, their ages were only guessed, and this is the information that followed them for the rest of their lives.
The proof of this occured in 1909 when the old age pension was introduced into ireland. People had to prove their ages and were forced to go through baptismal records to establish when they were born. That is why there is such HUGE discrepancies between ages in the 1901 census and the 1911 census of Ireland. Dates were found to be out by many many years in some cases.
Hope this helps you ,
Anne Dennehy