Emily Keegan

is currently at 19% in the lead, followed by Independent Ireland's Noel Thomas at 17%, and he's then followed by Helen Ogboo of Labour at 14%.

Now, those numbers do keep fluctuating.

They kind of keep passing each other out because it is still very early stages here in Galway West too, so it's changing all the time by the minute, practically.

So it's all going to come down to transfers here, very similar to Dublin Central, and it's...

looking like Helen Ogbue will get a good boost there because one can assume that a lot of the left candidates will give the transfers to her.

We've got Sinn Féin currently on 7% and Social Democrats at the same 7%.

So it's likely any transfers there will most likely go to another left candidate because certainly if the opinion polls is anything to go by, Independent Ireland's Noel Thomas is very, he's looking like he's going to get very few second preference votes.

Yeah, so at the moment he's at 6%, so he's just slightly behind the other left-wing parties.

I believe from the people I was speaking to, it wasn't predicted that he would do exceptionally well in this.

It seems he's almost being teed up for future elections to get his name out there.

So I think 6%, the fact that he isn't down the bottom of the barrel, it's a pretty good figure for him.

But we're expecting the first count results at 6 o'clock this evening, so it's looking like it's going to be a long one now for Galway.

Yeah, so these are new figures from the Central Statistics Office, which show that there's been a 7.7% decline in the number of marriages within those 10 years.

I think the biggest thing that was catching people's attention is the shift from Catholic weddings to civil ceremonies.

So in 2014, Catholic weddings were the most common marriage type.

There was 13,071 of them, but they fell in the decade by almost 51% to 6,425.

Yeah, and there's been a lot of talk about that, but I don't really know why people are so surprised.

If anyone's been going to weddings in recent years, I think you would know that it probably is far more common for people to be going down the civil or the humanist route with them.

And I think a lot of it also is to do with accessing the church as well.

It's a bit easier to have your wedding in the same venue that you're going to do the after party.