MOTHERS IN the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area are on average four years older at 33.3 years when they give birth than their counterparts in Limerick and Waterford cities at 29.1 years, latest Central Statistics Office figures have indicated. Meanwhile, the highest percentage of births outside marriage occurs in Limerick city, where more than half of all births are to single mothers.
This compares to Galway county, which has the lowest percentage of such births at 20 per cent. About 28 per cent of all births are outside of marriage. But when broken down further by age, almost three in every five births nationally to women under 30 – or some 4,200 births – were outside marriage in the third quarter of last year. More than half of these (2,209) children were born where the parents did not live at the same address or where the father’s details were not registered.
By contrast, less than one in six mothers over 30 years of age were unmarried. State-wide, 17 per cent of births during the period in question were to unmarried parents who were cohabiting.The figures are contained in the CSO’s statistics for the third quarter of 2007, which were published yesterday.
They reveal that there were 18,554 births registered in the third quarter of last year, an increase of over 1,600 on the same period in 2006.