A total of 3,240 divorce applications were made during 1999, according to the latest figures, and 2,444 divorces were granted. Divorce became legally available in the State exactly three years ago.
The 1999 figures compare with 2,761 divorce applications in the legal year ending July 1998, the last full calendar year for which figures are available. Only 1,421 were granted that year, so the speed with which divorces are going through the courts has increased.
The most startling fact to emerge from the latest statistics is that women outnumber men by two to one in seeking a divorce.
Last year was the first in which the gender of the applicant was given, and the figures for that year show that 1,611 of the divorces granted were on the application of the wife, while only 864 were on that of the husband.
The discrepancy is even more dramatic when it comes to judicial separations. There, women outnumber men by more than four to one in seeking this remedy to marriage breakdown. Of the successful applications processed last year, 853 were sought by women, while only 182 were initiated by men.
More than 8,000 people have sought divorces since they became available on February 27th, 1997. There were 7,728 applications up to December 1999 and, as applications come in at the rate of an average 250 a month, there are likely to have been another 500 applications since then.
However, there has been no reduction in the total numbers seeking judicial separation, the legal solution to marriage breakdown that offers most of the measures available through divorce, short of the right to remarry.
In 1999, 1,566 people sought a judicial separation, only marginally fewer than in the legal year ending July 1998, when 1,581 applications were made. Both of these are significantly higher than the figure for the year ending July 1997, when divorce was available for only five months of the legal year, and 1,263 people sought judicial separations that year.
In the 1996 legal year, the year before divorce was introduced, 1,740 people sought a judicial separation. However, the combined figures of those seeking either a divorce or a judicial separation in 1999, which amount to 4,806, are substantially greater than those seeking a judicial separation in 1996.
As in previous years, most applications for divorce and judicial separations are made in the big population centres, especially Dublin and Cork.
Dublin saw half of all applications last year, 1,564, and Cork had 328. Dublin had a third of all applications for judicial separation (492), while Cork had 230. Only six divorces were sought in Leitrim's Circuit Court in Carrick-on-Shannon, although 11 were granted, including some left over from the previous year.
A curious fact which emerges from the figures is that since the introduction of divorce, there has been no significant reduction in the number of people seeking the nullification of their marriages - a legal statement that the marriage never existed. Ninety such declarations were sought last year, and 52 granted. In 1996, when there was no divorce, there were 86 applications and 47 declarations.
This is of concern to family lawyers, as the nullification of a marriage leaves the parties concerned without any of the legal protections and entitlements offered by divorce.
About half of all divorce applications are made on legal aid. According to the annual report of the Legal Aid Board for 1998 (the last available report), more than 1,300 people were granted legal aid for divorce proceedings in that year. This was almost half of all divorce applications that year.
The vast majority of cases dealt with by the Legal Aid Board relate to family law.
While only about 10 per cent concern divorce, most of the rest involve separation, custody, access, maintenance, protection and barring orders - suggesting a much greater level of marital discord than that revealed in the divorce statistics.