It is common knowledge that a steep decline occurred in our marriage and birth rates during the 1980s and into the 1990s, and also that during that period a parallel sharp decrease in marital births was accompanied by a steady rise in the number of births outside marriage.
However, the fact that since the mid1990s these trends have been sharply reversed is less widely known. Moreover, the nature, extent, timing and possible significance of this recent development have not been paid much attention.
The decline in the marriage rate started in the 1970s, some years before the downturn in the birth rate began, and it represented a sharp reversal of what had been happening since 1961. For more than a decade after our economy began to recover from the almost total stagnation of the 1950s the number of marriages had risen sharply; a phenomenon that in my Irish Times column of November 6th, 1963, I correctly forecast would increase by almost two-fifths during the decade or so ahead, the number of marriages per thousand population.
That forecast was a logical deduction from the post-1961 decline in the massive volume of emigration that had caused our population to decrease ever since the Famine. Once started, that drop in emigration was bound to increase hugely the young population.
However, around the end of 1973 that rapid rise in the marriage rate was suddenly reversed. And within the following four years the number of marriages dropped by one-seventh, reducing the marriage rate (measured by the number of marriages per 100 women of marriageable age) by over one-fifth.
The factor in that decline was the economic crisis caused in 1973 by the Arab-Israeli war, and the huge increase in oil prices. Four years later the post-1977 phoney economic boom led to a very limited recovery in the marriage rate. But this was merely a temporary correction and petered out early in 1980.
It is significant that this renewed fall in the marriage rate started well over a year before the economic crisis of the early 1980s necessitated the emergency Budget of July 1981, and appears to have represented a resumption of an earlier secular decline rather than a reaction to economic events.
The 15-year-long continuous drop in the marriage rate that began in 1980 represented a return to a pattern that had started seven years earlier, and was only temporarily interrupted between 1978 and 1980.
The 1981-1989 economic crisis intensified the impact of the long-term factors which since the mid-1970s had begun to militate against marriage. But more fundamental social forces were at work, as this decline continued apace for half-a-dozen years after our economy started to recover in 1989. However, this prolonged decline in the marriage rate came to an end in 1995. What has brought about the recovery of about one-seventh in the marriage rate that has taken place since then? The economic boom that started in 1994 may have had some impact, but has not been the principal factor.
THE best clue to the real causes of the mid-1990s recovery in the marriage rate would be found in data relating to the age of marriage. But the latest age-of-marriage figures currently available relate to the year 1996, which is now over four years ago.
There has always been a long delay in the submission of these figure to the CSO by the Registrar General for Births, Deaths and Marriages, but recently this delay has increased to over three years.
However, even though post-1996 data for marriages by age are not yet available, the figures for the immediately preceding years, from 1992 to 1996, provide an important clue to the factors that lie behind the rise of one-fifth in the overall marriage rate that has been under way since 1995. Between 1992 and 1995 the overall marriage rate was still falling, because of the scale of the drop in the number of younger marriages of a further one-third in this brief period. But during that period this continuing downward trend in younger marriages was being accompanied by a clear reversal of the previous decrease in the marriage rate for women aged 3034. Indeed between 1992 and 1996 the marriage rate for women aged 30-34 rose by well over one-third.
It seems clear, therefore, that a boom in marriages of women aged 30 must have continued on a massive scale ever since, outweighing since 1995 the continuing decline in the number of younger marriages. This development shows all the signs of being attributable to a "biological clock factor". Much of the decline in the overall marriage rate before 1995 was accounted for by a postponement of child-bearing, and some at least of these women have become concerned to start a family before they get too far into their 30s.
That this is indeed the case is suggested by the fact that the long-term decline in marital fertility was reversed after 1994, and has risen by over 10 per cent since that time, thus virtually stabilising the number of marital births, despite a recent decline of almost one-eighth in the number of married women of child-bearing age.
It is significant that although in 1999 only 55 per cent of married women of child-bearing age were in their 30s. almost 90 per cent of the increase in marital fertility between 1994 and 1999 was accounted for by that age group.
Of course, throughout the whole of the past four decades the number of non-marital births has been rising steadily. Some of this increase is explained by the fact that the number of single women of child-bearing age doubled since 1961. But the non-marital birth rate, measured in terms of the number of such births in relation to the number of single women of child-bearing age, has also increased eightfold during this period.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie