Civil marriages on the rise while births are in decline

There has been a “significant shift” in the nature of the marriages registered in the State, with the number of people opting for religious ceremonies continuing to decline while civil marriages are on the rise.

The annual report of the Registrar General Kieran Feely noted the number of religious marriages, as a proportion of the total, fell from about 71 per cent in 2009 to 68 per cent last year.

“There has been a marked increase in the number of civil marriages over a lengthy period,” the report said.

Last year was the first full year that secular marriages were recognised in law and there were 894 such marriages registered during it, the report said.

Some 22,033 marriages were registered last year, a “substantial” 6.6 per cent increase on 2013.

Noting the shift towards civil ceremonies, the report said: “In 1996, there were 928 civil marriages, or 6 per cent of the total.

“This rose to 18 per cent in 2002 and 22 per cent in 2005. The proportion of civil marriages remained fairly static from 2005-2008, at around 22 per cent to 24 per cent.”

However, the report said that this figure rose to 29 per cent in 2009 - a “very considerable increase in the proportion of civil marriages” - before jumping to 32 per cent last year.

In the course of 2014, the HSE collected some €4.7 million for the solemnisation of civil marriages.

The registrar said that, while there were no statistics on the incidence of so-called “marriages of convenience”, anecdotal evidence suggested the increase in the number of civil marriages since 2008 was partly accounted for by this phenomenon.

This followed a European Court of Justice judgment that a non-EU spouse of a citizen of the EU can move and reside with that citizen within the EU without having previously been lawfully resident in a member state.

The registrar’s report said that while it would be “wrong to characterise all marriages between EU and non-EU nationals as marriages of convenience”, the relatively low conversion rate of notices of intention to marry into actual marriage would suggest that marriages of convenience were “a significant problem”.

Decline in births

The registrar’s report also noted that there had been a very substantial decline in the number of births registered in the State over the past three years.

Some 67,750 births were registered in 2014, up some 25 per cent on the year 2000.

However, declines in 2012, 2013 and 2014 were “very substantial”, the report said.

The number of births registered last year was down 11 per cent on the most recent peak year, 2008.

The number of deaths registered in 2014 was 29,368, down about 3 per cent on the previous year.

Publishing the report on Sunday, Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton noted last year saw the enactment of the Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014, which provided for further modernisation of the civil registration services "to best reflect the needs of modern society".

“This legislation makes it compulsory for the father’s name to be registered on birth certs, it makes it more difficult to broker a marriage of convenience . . . in the State, it provides for the recording of deaths of Irish people abroad and it allows for the validation of foreign embassy marriages and civil partnerships,” she said.