THE Church of Ireland Bishop of Tuam, the Right Rev John Neill, has expressed concern that new marriage regulations could lead to the easy termination of otherwise valid marriages.
Bishop Neill said yesterday he had "some sympathy" with the dilemma faced by Dr Dermot Clifford, the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, who had allowed his priests to go ahead with church weddings knowing them to be invalid under the new regulations.
However, he stressed that a Church of Ireland marriage licence would never be issued unless the civil regulations were adhered to.
In a letter to The Irish Times on Tuesday, Bishop Neill quoted a statement from the explanatory leaflet entitled The Family Law Act 1995: Changes in Irish Marriage Law: "The requirement to give three months' notification of marriage is a substantive requirement for a valid marriage."
The bishop wondered if "substantive" requirements should not refer to such fundamental issues as consent and marital status rather than the procedures to be followed.
He asked if the Family Law Act regarded marriage without due notice as "void" - i.e. deemed never to have taken place at all - or merely "voidable", that is, open to later challenge.
Noting that there were cases on record where a defect in a marriage licence was held to be insufficient grounds to render a marriage invalid, he asked if the courts would declare a marriage invalid merely because the legal three month notification had not been adhered to.
He also asked if the new procedures, introducing the "substantive" notice requirement, raised the question of whether marriage could be redefined in this way without constitutional change.
Bishop Neill said it was a "matter of great concern" that if the statement in the explanatory leaflet was taken at face value, "the validity of a marriage would appear to hang on a procedure within which there is much for error, leading to a very easy route to the ending of what in every other respect is a valid marriage".
Bishop Neill said yesterday that he and other clergy had been given "very, very short notice" of the new regulations. However, in some cases the clergy seemed to have been told about them before the marriage registrars who had to operate them.
He had first written to his clergy about the regulations on April 9th, giving them only a few weeks to inform prospective marriage partners planning an August wedding, that they had to get their notification in during May.
The director of the Catholic Press Office, Mr Jim Cantwell, agreed with Bishop Neill. "The really surprising thing is not that there were hitches with the new law but that they were so few. Credit for this must surely go to bishops and clergy of all denominations who, despite severe time constraints, did ensure on behalf of the State, that couples were informed of what the civil law now requires."
A spokesman for the Department of Equality and Law Reform said Bishop Neill's questions were answered by the legislation itself.
The three month rule was only one among several substantive requirements, he said. However, the fact that it was a substantive requirement meant that someone could now challenge the validity of a marriage on the grounds that the required notice had not been given.
He said the Act introduced a new requirement for a valid marriage, but the definition of marriage remained the same.