The extent of the current generation's rejection of early marriage may be seen from the fact that whereas in the late 1970s over one-third of women in the age group 20-24 were married, the proportion of those now in this age group who are married is less than one-tenth. Indeed at every age up to 27 the proportion of women who are married is today less than half what it was at the end of the 1970s.
As a result women are having babies much later. The commonest age of motherhood is now 30 or 31, as against 26 in 1979. Almost half of all births are now to women in their 30s, as against three-eighths in 1979. And as only one non-marital birth in seven is to a mother over 30, this sharp upward shift in the typical age of motherhood is clearly a function of a combination of late marriages and a postponement of births by those who married younger.
Meanwhile the proportion of births that are non-marital has risen to over one-quarter of the total, and if, as seems likely, the great majority of Irish abortions in Britain are of non-marital pregnancies, then the non-marital pregnancy rate must now be well over one-third. And the share of all first pregnancies that are non-marital must now be approaching 45 per cent.
(It should, however, be added that the number of teenage non-marital births has remained more of less constant since 1991: it is in the other age groups that non-marital births have risen, by no less than half in the past five years. What is far from clear is to what extent this remarkable increase reflects a growth in what might be called casual pregnancies, or in births to couples in stable non-marital relationships. No attempt has been made in Ireland, as has been done in some other countries, to establish the scale of such relationships here).
For a country where, as recently as 30 years ago, abortion was exceptional and only 1.5 per cent of all births were non-marital, these are remarkable and indeed alarming figures. There are in fact only two countries in Europe with a Catholic culture that have higher non-marital birth rates than ours, France and Slovenia, although the Austrian rate is running at around the same level as here.
In many culturally Catholic countries the non-marital birth rate is still at or below 10 per cent, i.e. well under half our figure. Of course in a number of these cases low figures for non-marital pregnancies could be accounted for by the availability of and frequent resort to abortion. Nevertheless, even after allowing for this abortion factor, the Spanish non-marital pregnancy rate, to take one example, is a good deal lower than ours.
So far as the fall in the marriage rate is concerned, if economic recession had been a significant contributory factor, one would have expected some reversal of this downward trend during the recent decade of economic recovery. But, although the number of single people available for marriage increased by one-third between 1986 and 1994, there was a further drop of one-eighth in the number of marriages during this period.
And in two very recent years of rapid economic growth, between 1994 and 1996, the number of marriages failed to increase, despite a further rise of one-eighth in the number of young single people available for marriage.
One does not have to undertake research to discover that a crucial factor in the drop in the marriage rate has been a marked unwillingness of this generation of young people to commit themselves to the permanent relationship that marriage, despite the introduction of divorce, still implies.
What is puzzling is the rapidity with which this change in attitudes on the part of the young towards life commitment came about. The phenomenon began to emerge in the mid-1970s, for the marriage rate, which had increased by almost half in the 15 years between 1957 and 1972, began to fall rapidly after 1974, although as late as 1979 the proportion married still remained for all age groups slightly higher than it had been in 1971.
But by 1986 the proportion married of the younger age groups had fallen sharply, by as much as three-fifths in the case of the 20-24 age group, and by one-tenth in the case of the 30-34 age group.
And this decline continued thereafter. Indeed in the short space of two years between 1994 and 1996 the proportion married of the 25-29 age group seems to have dropped by as much as two-fifths to 6 per cent, as against a figure of 34 per cent 17 years earlier. There are, it is true, some recent modest signs of a slight compensating increase in the number of late marriages.
Thus between 1991 and 1996 the number of marriages of women who had been in their 30s in 1991 was slightly greater than had been the case five years earlier. There may also be some encouragement to be derived from the increase of 9 per cent in the total number of births that has taken place during the 2 1/2 years to June last.
Something less than half of this increase was accounted for by a rise during this most recent 30-month period in the number of women of child-bearing age, but the rest of this increase represented a genuine rise in fertility, the first that we have seen for many decades.
The relatively small increase of a couple of percentage points in overall fertility during this period obscures the real magnitude of the underlying phenomenon, the scale of which is in fact quite striking.
In the case of married women in their 20s and 30s, the increase in fertility between 1994 and 1996 (detailed figures for the first half of this year are not yet available) was over 10 per cent, and for single people in their 20s the fertility increase over this two-year period has been around 20 per cent.
The explanation of this apparent discrepancy lies in the fact that in this recent period there was a continuing large increase in the numbers of young single people, who have a lower fertility rate, while the number of higher-fertility young married people dropped.
This shift in the ratio between single and married went a long way towards offsetting the impact of the substantial increases in fertility rates within each category. While these most recent trends in our marriage and fertility rates offer some encouragement, one does not have to be a conservative fundamentalist to be disturbed by the cumulative effect of the trends of the past two decades.
Marriage is a stabilising factor in society. Moreover it is better for both mothers and their children that child-bearing should not be too long postponed. And while many children raised by one parent, whether because of widowhood, marital separation or divorce, or because they are non-marital children, experience no ill-effects from the absence of a second parent, in general it is better for children to be raised in a two-parent home.
Society as a whole thus has an interest in encouraging marriage and in promoting its stability. It also has an interest in encouraging marriage to take place before the age of 30, rather than after, thus encouraging mothers to have children by their early 30s rather than at a later age.
And given that in the past 20 years Irish society has in these respects drifted in what can be seen to be an undesirable direction, the State, representing society, has an interest in steps that might help to halt or reverse this process. It is, I feel, disturbing that there has hitherto been no public or political discussion about these matters, nor have the churches made much of these issues.
For it seems to me that there is a case for re-examining State policies, including perhaps tax and social welfare policies, with a view to seeing how these might be modified in order to make marriage less unattractive to young people and to encourage earlier child-bearing.
But for such a policy review to be worthwhile, it would need to be preceded by research into the reasons for the remarkable demographic shifts that have been taking place here during the past couple of decades.