Divorce is Ireland's fastest-growing marital status category, according to the latest figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Almost 60,000 divorcees are living in Ireland a decade after divorce was introduced on to the statute books.
The rate of divorce has increased rapidly in recent years, with 59,500 people giving their marital status as divorced in the 2006 census, compared with 35,100 in 2002, an increase of 70 per cent in just four years.
Limerick city - at 12.9 per cent - has the State's highest proportion of marriages ending in divorce, separation or desertion, followed by Dublin city at 11.6 per cent. Marital breakdown rates were lowest in the Galway county area - 6.3 per cent.
Galway city is the State's singles capital, according to the CSO, with almost 60 per cent of the city's population being recorded as single last year.
Maynooth, another university town with a large youth population, also has a predominantly single population, with 56 per cent of people recording their status as single in the last census.
Rural-dwellers were found to be more likely to marry than their urban counterparts. In cities and large towns, 47 per cent of those aged over 15 recorded their status as single, compared with 37 per cent of the rural population.
More than 1,100 teenagers said that they had already been married at the time of the last census. Of these, 948 were still married, 74 were separated or deserted, 64 were widowed and 16 were divorced.
Almost all of the married teenagers were in their first marriage. However, seven had remarried following widowhood or the dissolution of their first marriage.
Children under the age of 14 accounted for just over 20 per cent of the population in the census. However, the percentage of children living in Dublin's commuter belt is far higher than the national average. Ratoath in Co Meath has the highest proportion of children aged under 14 - 32 per cent.
The population of the seaside town of Donabate in Fingal, north Dublin, is made up of 30.5 per cent children, while the next highest proportions of under-14s were found in the small rural towns of Prosperous, Co Kildare (29.3 per cent), and Dunboyne, Co Meath (29.1 per cent).
Rural areas had higher proportions of older people than did urban areas. People over 65 account for 11 per cent of the population. However, in rural areas this rises to 12.2 per cent, compared with 10.3 per cent in urban areas.
Castlerea in Co Roscommon had the highest proportion of pensioners, at 23.2 per cent of its population, while Kinsealy, in the Fingal County Council area, had the lowest proportion of residents over 65 - just 1.3 per cent of its population.
