Percentage of Catholic weddings in Ireland

Fred Swanson wrote: »

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It would hardly be practical to ask people returning to the state 'did you get married abroad to circumvent the notice period and deprive the state of €300' and people going even to the UK and paying their fees would hardly make a saving on €300. Short of not recognising overseas marriages, how would they make residents comply with Irish laws?

Fred Swanson wrote: »

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There is no Irish law that requires people who marry abroad to give 3 month's notice to the Irish authorities; you only have to give notice if you intend to marry in Ireland. And obviously there's no point in taking steps to make people "comply" with a non-existent law.

Fred Swanson wrote: »

I wonder does it happen much that Irish citizens go abroad to circumvent the notice periods and deprive the state of the €300 fee?

It often happens that people marry abroad. I kind of doubt that in many cases there motivation for doing so is to avoid the notice requirement or to save €300.

In any event, as already noted about one in eight marriages celebrated in Ireland is of a couple who don't live here, but have come here to get married. They do give notice and pay the fee. So my guess would be that wedding tourism probably represents a net gain, not a net loss, to the Irish state.

Peregrinus wrote: »

From the link provided by Pherykedes, about 13% of the weddings celebrated in Ireland last year were for couples living outside Ireland.

Quite a few of these would be like us - emigrants coming back for the wedding. We had a humanist ceremony in May 2015.

matrim wrote: »

Which assumes you wanto to joint the Humanist association. Nothing against them but not everyone would want that.

Not everybody wants to join the Catholic church either.

But the Humanists don't have to be the only show in town as regards non-religious, non-registry-office marriages. Other organisations which celebrate marriages and which comply with the same statutory criteria that get the HAI in can apply for recognition, and can get their celebrants licensed as solemnisers. I just don't think any have applied.

A very quick glance at the figures shows:

matrim wrote: »

Humanists performed 5.7% of marriages but have only 0.4% of registered Solemnisers
Civil cermonies were 28% of marriages but only 1.8% of Solemnisers
Catholics were 56% of marriages but they have 78.2% of Solemnisers.

You also have 3.7% Spiritualist with about 0.2% of Solemnisers. Any of their ceremonies that I have been to are for non-religious people.

Well, the church solemnisers aren't primarily engaged in solemnising weddings; they are priests in a variety of ministries, and I suspect many of them rarely or never celebrate weddings. Whereas the Humanist and Spiritualist solemniserwstend to be professional celebrants - that's all they do; it's how they earn their crust. So it wouldn't be suprising to find them celebrating far more weddings than the typically church-registered solemniser.

matrim wrote: »

Now that may not take into account certain things like retired priests but it does show that as there is a growing need for non-religious ceremonies and Solemnisers

There is certainly a growing need. My point is that the number of non-religious solemnisers is not artificially depressed by the imposition of special barriers to getting registered as a solemniser. There's no limit to the number of solemnisers the HAI can register, and the training and accreditation that the HAI has to give to its solemnisers is considerable less than the training/accreditation most churches give to the solemnisers that they register. And if there are people out there dissatisfied with the willingness of the HAI to train, accredit and register sufficient solemnisers to celebrate weddings in the way desired, there is nothing to stop them organising a separate body and applying for recognition.

pilly wrote: »

I could be wrong but I thought you still had to give notice. I've a friend who married in Greece and she still had to give notice here. Not sure if it was 3 months or not but I definitely remember her saying that she still had to follow procedures here so that her marriage would be recognised.

Nope. Civil Registration Act 2004 s. 46(1)(a)(i):

"A marriage solemnised in the State, after the commencement of this section, between persons of any age shall not be valid in law unless the persons concerned . . . notify any registrar in writing in a form for the time being standing approved by an tArd-Chláraitheoir of their intention to marry not less than 3 months prior to the date on which the marriage is to be solemnised . . ."

The notification requirement only applies to marriages solemnised in the State.

Marriages celebrated abroad are registered abroad. They are not registered in Ireland, even if one or both spouses is an Irish citizen or an Irish resident. Because they are not registered in Ireland, there are no Irish notice or other requirements to be complied with before registration can be made.

Obviously, I don't know what your friend who married in Greece had to do, but it wasn't giving notice of her intention to marry. Possibly she had to obtain a letter of freedom from the Irish authorities to satisfy Greek requirements - many countries require this - but, if that were the case, she needed the letter not so that her marriage would be recognised in Ireland, but so that it could take place in Greece.

seamus wrote: »

. . . But Irish law doesn't recognise a foreign divorce if you're resident in Ireland. Even worse if you got divorced before 1986. So I think you're right that a lot of people are probably not "legally" married in the strictest sense and don't realise it. I do think if push came to shove though, whatever agency discovered these "invalid" marriages would be told to quietly stop pulling at that thread. TDs hate having to deal with issues where there's religious polarisation.

It's not usually a state agency that's doing the thread-pulling. The registrar's office will refuse to marry you, or to issue documentation allowing you to marry in Ireland, if they think your foreign divorce is invalid. But they won't stop you going off and celebrating a marriage in another jurisdiction, and they won't be involved when you come home and, e.g. notify the Revenue or the Dept of Social Protection that you are married.

Where things come unstuck after that, it's not state agencies pulling at threads; it's family members, usually with a financial interest, making a claim in respect of the breakdown of the first marriage, or the breakdown of the second marriage, or squabbling over assets in the estate of one or other of the parties to the second marriage, who has died. In that case the question of the validity of the second marriage comes before the courts, and TDs can't "quietly tell" the courts what to do in this (or any other) case. The courts wouldn't like that at all.

Walter H Price wrote: »

I honestly don't know anyone that has gone away and gotten married in a Church all been Hotels bar 1 that was a beach wedding and 1 in Las Vegas, so i cant imagine that's skewing the figures too much tbh.

That may just reflect the social circle in which you move, Walter, which (like everybody else's) is limited. A sample of two foreign weddings among the friends of Walter H. Price yields none which was in a church; we really can't draw very many conclusions from this and any conclusions we can draw would about Walter H. Price.

There's a lively trade in Irish couples marrying in churches in Rome, and a couple of travel agencies which cater specifically to this market. As it happens, they don't need to have a civil ceremony when they come home; a church wedding is legally recognised in Italy and, therefore, in Ireland. But if people are travelling abroad to marry and are marrying in churches in Rome, it's not impossible that they are marrying in churches elsewhere too.

The huge decline notwithstanding, about two-thirds of first weddings celebrated in Ireland are in churches. You'd assume that foreign weddings are also split between church and non-church ceremonies. I wouldn't assume the split is the same; some of those who go abroad to marry do so, I suspect, partly as a strategy to avoid or resist family pressure for a church wedding. But many go for other reasons, and there would be no reason to assume that their attitude to the church/non-church question is any different to that of couples who chose to marry in Ireland.

I agree that the decline in the proportion of weddings celebrated in church hasn't stopped yet. It will continue and we can't at this stage say where it will stop. Some clue - really, no more than a straw in the wind - can be got by looking at other societies in the Anglosphere which are subject to the same cultural influences as we are, but are more secularised. In Australia 30% of weddding are celebrated in churches. In England, 37%. In Scotland (where, as in Ireland, legally-valid humanist weddings are a possibility), 39%.

My hunch is that the "floor" in Ireland might turn out to be a little bit higher than this, if only because the most influential religious tradition in Ireland is Catholicism rather than Protestantism, and Catholicism denies the spiritual validity of civil weddings for its adherents, while Protestantism generally does not. In so far as Catholicism exercises any influence over people's choices in a largely secularised society, therefore, that influence is more likely to result in people choosing church weddings than a similar degree of Protestant influence would.

If we widen the picture beyond the Anglosphere, a more diverse picture emerges. France is a highly secularised society and, as we know, a civil wedding is mandatory for legal recognition; if you want a church (or humanist) celebration you have that in addition to a civil wedding, not instead of it (and, by law, the civil ceremony must come first). You might expect that to result in a very low rate of weddings being (re)celebrated in church, but not so; about 50% of French civil weddings are followed by a church ceremony. That might be an indicator of the residual influence of the Catholic position on weddings in a substantially secularised society.

Of couse, the non-church-wedding trend is only part of the secularisation picture. We also have to take into account the proportion of people who are in a committed relationship but are not married. This is harder to measure because not every couple that live together necessarily has the kind of committed conjugal relationship that is analogous to marriage (though undoubtedly many do). And of course some of those who are cohabiting do intend to marry, when they have the money, or after a couple of years of planning, and when that marriage occurs it may be in a church. Still, there's actually two distinct groups who are making choices that explicitly reject the Catholic position on marriage: people who are in a committed relationship but intend never to marry, and people who have married, but not in a church. And you need to take both into account when measuring the impact of secularisation on Irish practices when it comes to marriage.

I haven't been to any weddings in several years...we are doomed, the death knell of the family, no more weddings!

Peregrinus wrote: »

If we widen the picture beyond the Anglosphere, a more diverse picture emerges. France is a highly secularised society and, as we know, a civil wedding is mandatory for legal recognition; if you want a church (or humanist) celebration you have that in addition to a civil wedding, not instead of it (and, by law, the civil ceremony must come first). You might expect that to result in a very low rate of weddings being (re)celebrated in church, but not so; about 50% of French civil weddings are followed by a church ceremony. That might be an indicator of the residual influence of the Catholic position on weddings in a substantially secularised society.

I think this conclusion might be to simplistic. More secularized societies tend to have a lot better laws around the rights of cohabiting couples. I've been to surprisingly few non religious weddings in Slovenia (where I come from) despite country being very secular. However those who are not religious just don't bother getting married because cohabiting rights are equalized after certain period.

Murrisk wrote: »

So still quite a drop off. Interesting what the likes of Nox above would make of that. The figure doesn't anywhere near tally with his anecdotal observations. Even among the potential cohort for Catholic ceremonies, nearly four out of ten are deciding not to get married in a Catholic church.

Well, no. Only 78% of the population identifies as Catholic. The total of 18,984 first marriages must include many couples where the spouses are not Catholic; presumably we can't include them in the "potential cohort for Catholic marriages". And, where one spouse is a Catholic and the other is not, the reason they don't turn up in the 12,140 Catholic marriages will in some cases be because they are marrying in the church of the other spouse.

We don't have figures for the religious affiliation of spouses; the Registrar doesn't collect that information. So we can't make the appropriate adjustments here.

The 64% figure is therefore fairly rubbery. I suggest the real significance is found not in the value of 64%, but the changes in that value from census to census. I haven't done the exercise for previous census, but I'd be fairly confident that the figure has declines significantly in the past 20 years, and is still declining.

Murrisk wrote: »

It's untrue that people with non-Catholic future spouses can't be included in the cohort. My friend had a Catholic ceremony with her Anglican husband-to-be.

No. I think we have two groups here:

First, couples where neither spouse is Catholic. The fact that these people don't choose Catholic weddings tells us nothing about secularisation.

Secondly, couples where one spouse is Catholic and the other not. If such a couple doesnt choose a Catholic wedding, that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about secularisation. They could still be having a religious wedding.

Take a step back. The relevance of first-time opposite-sex marriages is that they all could be celebrated in churches, if the couple wished. Hence knowing how they are celebrated provides a relevant measure of secularisation.

What we know from the published statistics is that more-or-less 64% of first-time opposite-sex marriages are celebrated in Catholic ceremonies. The other 36% are divided between:

- civil ceremonies and Humanist ceremonies (both basically non-religious)

- Spiritualist ceremonies (some of which are for non-religious couples and some for couples who are somewhat religious, but unchurched, and a few of which are actually for Spiritualists)

- ceremonies of other religious denominations (which we obviously can’t count as non-religious)

But we don't have a breakdown of the 36% between those categories. So we don't actually know what percentage of first-time opposite-sex marriages are celebrated in religious ceremonies.

Still, the dominance of the Catholic church in Ireland is such that measuring changes in that 64% figure probably does serve as a useful proxy for secularisation. If that figure is going down, it's not likely that other religious ceremonies are going up by enough to compensate for it. So while it doesn't give us an absolute measure of the secularisation of Irish society, it probably does give us a good indication of trends in secularisation over time.

Murrisk wrote: »

Anyhoo, no matter way you look at it, figures for Catholic ceremonies are dropping fast.

Yes, I agree.

And this is to be expected. The proportion of the population identifying as Catholic has been declining sharply. Wouldn't we expect a corresponding decline in the proportion of the population celebrating their wedding in Catholic ceremonies?

There's still a gap, of course. 78% of the population identified as Catholic in the 2016 census, but only 64% of first-time opposite-sex marriages in 2016 were celebrated in Catholic ceremonies.

I suspect the gap is partly explained by demographics. 78% Catholic identification is the figure for the population as a whole, but first-time oppose-sex marriages are overwhelmingly celebrated by people in their 20s and 30s. The breakdown of Catholic identification by age has not yet been published, but the breakdown of the non-religious population by age has been, and guess what? Non-religious identification peaks for people aged between 20 and 40. So it seems highly likely that the proportion of the population aged between 20 and 40 who identify as Catholic is well below 78%. When that statistic is published, we may find it's a good deal closer to 64%.

No, you misunderstand me. I'm not seeking to refute you; I think we're in broad agreement. Catholicism is in decline, and this is reflected both in the Census figures for those identifying as Catholic, and in the Marriage statistics for those marrying in Catholic ceremonies. And (again, I think we both agree about this) the decline has probably not finished yet; future Censuses/marriage statistics will show further decline.

My point is that the marriage statistics require a little bit of unpacking in order to see exactly what it is they do say about secularisation, and what they don't. But my conclusion, for what it's worth, is that they seem to be pretty much confirming what the census figures are saying. We'll have a better handle on that when the more detailed census results are released, but I'd be very surprised if they change that conclusion very much.