David QuinnTwenty years after the divorce referendum, David Quinn looks at what predictions came true
Twenty years ago last week, Ireland voted in favour of divorce by the narrowest of margins, a mere 0.7%. Had it been raining in Dublin, not Donegal on polling day, the proposition would probably have gone down by the narrowest of margins.
To mark the anniversary, liberal Ireland essentially crowed about it in various media outlets. We were told that the anti-divorce side had it all wrong because it forecast that if we voted for divorce, the ‘floodgates’ would open and we would soon find ourselves with the sort of high divorce rates we see in countries like Britain and America.
That did not happen. Instead, the Irish divorce rate is the lowest in Europe, and is only a third of the British level.
But this does not tell the full story because looking at our divorce figures only, does not tell us all we need to know. In addition, campaigners for divorce also made predictions that have not come to pass. We are not told about those. Quoting Irish divorce figures on their own gives a highly misleading picture of the true extent of marital breakdown in Ireland. You have to add in figures for separation as well, because many Irish couples separate but do not divorce.
If you take divorce on its own, then the number of Irish people who had been through a divorce as at Census 2011 was 130,730, a not insubstantial figure. But an additional 116,194 people were separated only. This brings the total number of people in Ireland who were separated or divorced as at 2011 to just under a quarter of a million.
Separated
In 1986, the figure for separated people was 40,347 (obviously divorce wasn’t available then), and in 1996 it was 94,433.
So the number of people who have suffered a broken marriage in Ireland has been increasing fairly rapidly. The number is being added to at a rate of 10,000 individuals, or 5,000 couples per annum on average.
Even adding the number of separations to the number of divorces, our marital breakdown rate is still only about half the UK divorce rate, but it’s a lot higher than simply looking at divorce on its own.
In fact, if you consider that around 20,000 couples marry each year in Ireland, and 5,000 or so couples divorce or separate that means the marital breakdown rate here is running at around one in four. That is not especially low by any means.
In fact, that figure of around one in four is roughly what the late Cardinal Cahal Daly thought it might become in light of the Northern Ireland experience.
To throw a bit more light on it, one in five marriages in cities like Dublin and Limerick have ended in divorce or separation.
Why do so many Irish people separate and not divorce? The main reason seems to be that in order to get a divorce you have to show you and your spouse have been living separate lives for three out of the last four years.
So many couples opt for a judicial separation instead. That sorts out custody and access arrangements with regard to the children, and it sorts out the financial arrangements.
Incidentally, a trawl I did through some newspaper archives for the four weeks leading up to the 1995 divorce referendum revealed few predictions on the part of the main anti-divorce campaigners about the ‘floodgates’ opening if we said ‘Yes’.
Professor William Binchy, for example, mostly tried to highlight some of the injustices divorce would introduce, especially in the form on offer, namely unilateral, no-fault divorce which allows someone to be divorced against their will and for wrongful behaviour on the part of one spouse to be ignored by the judge in coming to a divorce settlement.
We did not have to introduce that type of divorce.
Cohabitation
What did campaigners for divorce get wrong? Then Taoiseach John Bruton predicted that rates of cohabitation would drop because separated people who were living together could marry instead.
In fact, the number of cohabiting couples has soared from 31,296 in 1996 to 143,000 in 2011.
I do not point this out to have a go at John Bruton, because he is one of our best and most thoughtful public figures (read the newly published compilation of his articles and speeches, Faith in Politics, to find that out for yourself).
The Irish Times also misread things. In its final editorial before the result of the referendum was known, it said that the rejection of divorce in the 1986 referendum “had the predictable effect of reducing the number of married partnerships and increasing the number of children whose parents are not legally contracted to each other”.
The argument was that the absence of a right to remarry was deterring people, including parents, from getting married in the first place.
The clear implication of this argument is that by permitting divorce, people would be less reluctant to marry, and marriage would become more popular. Instead, the percentage of the population who are married has continued to decline and the percentage of children “whose parents are not legally contracted to each other” has rocketed from 18% in 1996 to 28.1% in 2011.
This, of course, bears out a big part of the argument put forward by the anti-divorce campaign. They knew that divorce, especially in the form on offer, marked the transition of Ireland from a society that placed huge emphasis on permanence and commitment, to one that placed much more importance on personal happiness, even if that means breaking a solemn vow to someone else.
Anti-divorce campaigners knew that this would inevitably lead to a retreat from marriage, a jump in the amount of marriage breakdown, a jump in the amount of cohabitation and a jump in the number of children who are raised outside marriage.
All of this has happened. It is not a direct result of introducing divorce by any means, but the introduction of divorce did signify our transformation into a society that does not value permanence and commitment the way it once did.
The real irony is that something introduced in the name of ‘happiness’, may actually have increased the sum total of unhappiness in this country by helping to increase the amount of family breakdown.