At the time of the divorce referendum two years ago there was much debate about the level of marriage breakdown in Ireland and about the extent to which the availability of divorce might or might not destabilise marriage further.
My own view on the latter point was that the "floodgates" argument was overworked, and that in our State what is technically known as the "total divorce rate", the proportion of marriages which would ultimately be dissolved, would turn out to be about one-third that in Britain. In other words, only about 15-20 per cent of marriages would eventually end in divorce. I based this conclusion upon three indicators. These were the current total divorce rate in the two communities in Northern Ireland, which is just over 20 per cent in the Catholic community there and just over 25 per cent in the Protestant community; the rate in Italy, a country with a Roman Catholic culture, where it has been about 7 per cent; and the rate in Spain, where it has been higher than in Italy but lower than that for Catholics in Northern Ireland. Do the early figures for divorce applications here support this estimate?
It is really too early to say. First of all, the divorce applications procedure has been in operation only since last February, so we do not yet have figures for a full 12month period. And, second, there may have been technical factors slowing down the applications procedure during the initial period. A clear picture of the initial flow of applications may not become available until towards the end of next year.
Moreover, in assessing the likely eventual level of divorce in Ireland account must be taken of the subsequent experience of other countries which have introduced it in recent decades, Spain and Italy. In Spain, the divorce rate a decade after its introduction was one-third higher than the initial rate, and in Italy the rate increased by about half during the first decade after divorce was introduced.
However, even allowing for these factors, it is already clear that we are not facing the flood of applications which some had foretold, and which might, perhaps, have been expected at the outset at least, in view of the backlog of potential demand that appeared to have built up because of the scale of marriage breakdown during the last two decades. Indeed, it may well be that my estimate of an eventual 15-20 per cent divorce rate could in time prove to have been unduly pessimistic.
However that may be, it is nevertheless clear from other recently-published figures that even if our divorce rate turned out to be lower than had been feared, the marriage breakdown rate, by contrast, is disturbingly high, and rising. And, for reasons to which I shall return later, contrasting trends of these two phenomena could raise some worrying questions for our society.
The recently-published marriage breakdown figures are contained in Volume 2 of the 1996 Census, which gives for each year of age the number of married people who in April last year were either legally or informally separated, divorced, deserted, or had had their marriages annulled.
Because this is the third census that has recorded such data, we now have not merely an up-to-date snapshot of our overt marriage breakdown situation as it stood last year, but also a clear indication of what can now be seen to be an accelerating trend in the rate of such overt breakdowns.
These recent censuses have shown that of those born before 1923 the overt marriage breakdown rate, as measured by these data on separations etc, was 3.2 per cent. The 1986 Census showed, however, that for women born around 30 years later, between 1949 and 1953, a slightly higher proportion of marriages, 3.7 per cent , had already broken down by the time they were in their early 30s. And in 1991 the figure for this age group had risen to 6.0 per cent; by last year the figure was 9 per cent. Even if the 1991-1996 breakdown rate at later levels does not rise further, the 1996 breakdown figure of 9 per cent for those born in the early 1950s will eventually increase to 16 per cent , and, on the same basis, the final breakdown figure for married women now in their early 20s would be over 30 per cent.
However, as between the 1986-1991 period and the 1991-1996 period the marriage breakdown rate over the whole range of ages accelerated by almost one-third, it would be optimistic to assume that this deterioration in the trend will not continue in the future. Accordingly, on present trends we could be moving towards an eventual breakdown rate of at least one-third.
Moreover, a new and disturbing feature in the 1991-1996 period has been the extraordinarily high breakdown rate in the early years of marriages entered into by very young women. If the practice of shotgun marriages in the case of teenage pregnancies, common up to the 1970s, had persisted, such a development might not be too surprising. But last year the number of births to 19-year-olds was in fact one-third lower than 17 years earlier, and over 92 per cent of these were non-marital births.
Thus there is clearly no longer any pressure on teenagers who become pregnant to marry before the birth of their baby. The numbers of teenagers married last year was in fact only one-tenth of the 1979 figure. Against this background one might have expected a decline in the early breakdown rate for very young marriages, and yet between 1986 and 1996 the proportion of the greatly reduced number of very young women whose marriages had already broken down before the age of 23 jumped from less than 2 per cent to 11 per cent. A very disturbing picture indeed emerges, when one brings together the different elements of our current social demography: the decline in, as well as postponement of, marriage; the large and accelerating increase in marriage breakdown; what may turn out to be a relatively low figure for divorce applications; and the huge increase in non-marital pregnancies involving births to non-teenage mothers. What all this seems to add up to is that for very many people the institution of marriage has simply lost much of its significance.
What is at stake here is not just a widespread acceptance of pre-marital sex and co-habitation by young people before child-bearing, but something much more disturbing, viz a widespread dissociation of marriage and child-bearing.
In the past these have been closely linked. Within most societies, at any rate in non-tropical countries, marriage has been seen as a crucially-important factor in ensuring a stable two-parent basis for the upbringing of the child. ,
Of course the emergence of a dissociation of marriage and child-bearing is not an exclusively Irish phenomenon, but its scale is now greater here than in quite a number of other European countries, and the speed with which this dissociation has emerged in Ireland seems to have been faster than elsewhere. As a result, in our case this process involves an unusual scale of potential social disruption.
While the latest census data have served to highlight this phenomenon and have provided us with a better tool for measuring its ultimate scale than we have previously had available, this process had of course started , at least 20 years ago. It was, indeed, my concern about this rapidly-emerging social trend that led me to change my mind about divorce when I was Taoiseach in the mid-1980s.
Despite my personal commitment to indissoluble monogamy I felt obliged by the trends emerging in the early 1980s to face the fact that persistence with a "no divorce" policy could create a climate within which the emergence of informal second unions unrecognised by church or State would eventually undermine marriage far more seriously than a restricted form of divorce could conceivably do.
This was, in fact, the basis upon which the government I led argued the case at that time. We accepted that any divorce provision might have a negative effect on some existing marriages, but suggested that the growing number of people who in the absence of divorce were finding themselves in irregular unions, as well as the rapidly growing number of children of such unions, was likely to become an even more destabilising factor in society.
It was noticeable, however, that during the subsequent referendum campaign this crucial issue was never addressed by any of the non-political protagonists on either side.
We will never know whether, if the divorce referendum had been passed in 1986 instead of 1995, this dangerous trend towards the undermining of marriage would have been halted, or at any rate slowed. Perhaps it was already too late to stop this process.
However that may be, it should be clear now that the social consequences of these developments are potentially very serious.
There is now an urgent need to undertake research into the factors underlying this process and to draw on all available expertise to assess what steps might yet be taken to minimise its ill-effects. And this is clearly a responsibility of the State, which, after all, is the mechanism through which a society orders its affairs for the general good.