Lorcan Nyhan

It's the old Darrell O'Brien line of, I don't believe in God, still a Catholic.

You know, there is that element of.

And so if you're looking at three out of 10 marriages are,

are Catholic.

I don't think you would say only three out of ten kids in Ireland are baptised, do their communion.

So I think people are still attached there because there's no ceremony to replace it.

People like really the idea of the baptism because of the day.

They like the idea of the communion because of the day.

Because there's no replacement for it while there is for a wedding.

And so it's actually the rise in the humanist society is one who's kind of taken over.

The amount of civil registration has stayed basically the same.

But the humanist ceremonies have gone up by about 68%.

There's an element then as well where if you look and you look back on the stats, which I find interesting anyway, is that every 10 years, the average age of brides and grooms goes up two years.

So if you go back to 2004 through to 2014 to 2024, the age has changed by about two years.

We are now looking at the average age to get married for the bride is about 36 and the groom is about 38, which does suggest that people are moving life faster.

kind of touch points later in life.

And that's obviously part of a lot of the talk around like, you know, lulls in birth rates rather than decreases in birth rates, that it's actually lulls in birth rate that the birth rate will catch up.

It's just people are doing everything later, whether that's because of kind of career preference or whether that's because people just feel ready later in life, whatever it might be for.

So I think the marriage and the CSO giving us these stats gives us a really good insight into Irish culture.

But I also think there's a degree where parents do still, even if they are no longer practising Catholics themselves, do like the idea of a Catholic education, because that is the education that they had.