Among the information that has already emerged from the publication of the first volumes of the 2006 census there is up-to-date data on marriage breakdown, writes Garret FitzGerald.
From statistics about our female population it emerges that by last year 14 per cent of marriages with living partners had broken down, but only 6 per cent had ended in divorce.
However, for several reasons this figure understates the problem. First of all, less than 8 per cent of marriages break down before couples pass their mid-thirties. Moreover, older people, coming from a generation for whom marital breakdown was much less common, have a marriage breakdown rate of only 7 per cent. These two factors artificially depress the longer-term average.
The significant fact is that married women aged 35 to 64 have experienced an average marriage breakdown rate of 17 per cent - and in the four years between 2002 and 2006 this had increased by three percentage points.
How much higher is this rising marital breakdown rate likely to go? That is difficult to judge. But in the light of the latest data I am inclined to stick to the view that I expressed after the 2002 census: that over the next couple of decades this rate may increase to about 25 per cent for those aged 45 to 64, but is unlikely to go much higher in the foreseeable future.
If correct, that would mean that even in 20 years' time the scale of marital breakdown in Ireland among the middle-aged could be no more than half the present overall breakdown rate in Britain.
This runs contrary to the kind of fears expressed by some Catholic Church leaders at the time of the divorce referendums of 1986 and 1995.
Moreover - although this is, of course, influenced by a time-lag effect - at this stage less than half of marriage breakdowns have led to divorce.
However, in the four years between the last two censuses this ratio of divorces to breakdowns rose by one-third, and this divorce-to-breakdown ratio is likely to continue to increase in the years ahead - rising eventually, I would judge, towards a situation in which perhaps two-thirds of all breakdowns might end in divorce. But, even if this happens, on the basis of the breakdown rate rising to about 25 per cent in 2025, the divorce rate would be unlikely by then to have reached a figure significantly above one-sixth of all marriages. That would be in line with the rate that I forecast at the time of the 1986 divorce referendum.
What proportion of women who have gone through a divorce then remarry? So far this has occurred following only 30 per cent of divorces.
The fact that this ratio is currently so low will surprise many people as there was a widespread assumption that the demand for the introduction of divorce from the 1970s onwards was mainly a reflection of a desire on the part of people whose marriages had broken down to enter into second unions recognised by the State.
In fact fewer than expected of those whose marriages have broken down and who have entered into second unions have felt a need to regularise their situation by entering into marriage for a second time.
To some degree this reflects the fact that a minority of couples have chosen cohabitation rather than marriage, at least for a period. The 2006 census recorded 119,000 couples of the opposite sex reporting cohabitation but that is only 7 per cent of all couples living together. However, more than one-third of these had children and reported co-habitation had risen by more than half since 2002.
As might have been expected, marriage breakdown remains more frequent in urban than rural Ireland.
Thus in our main cities the breakdown rate is on average 40 per cent higher than elsewhere in the country. Indeed in the case of the city of Limerick, marriage breakdown is almost twice as high as it is outside our five main centres and is 40 per cent higher there than in Dublin. This Limerick phenomenon would seem to merit further study.
There is also a strong case for research into the impact of marriage breakdown on the children involved. As far as I am aware, we have no information on the proportion of children involved in such breakdowns, nor on how they are affected by the separation of their parents. We do not even know what proportion of them retain contact with both of their parents.
For a country which likes to think of itself as child-oriented and child-caring, we are remarkably insensitive to issues of this kind - just as we have almost totally neglected the issue of pre-schooling, and have made grossly inadequate provision for parental leave to facilitate caring for very young children by working parents.
The insensitivity of our government system to such social issues was vividly demonstrated some years ago when, through the introduction of tax individualisation, incentives were introduced to encourage parents, including those with young children, to re-enter employment - even when they might have preferred to care for their children themselves, if they could have afforded it.
I believe that parents should be left free, without misguided economically-oriented State interventions, to decide for themselves the extent to which both of them should work when their children are young.
The whole area of childcare, especially in the case of less well-off parents, including single mothers, who find it necessary to work while their children are young, has also been grossly neglected by our governments.
Through such social neglect we are storing up problems for our society in the decades to come.