Ceremony Insights

Ireland's Weddings Are Quietly Changing: What a Decade of CSO Data Reveals About Choosing a Solemniser

27 August 2026 · By Edel Garvey, licensed solemniser, County Galway · 8 min read

Every year the Central Statistics Office quietly publishes the full breakdown of how Irish couples actually got married — by denomination, by county, by age, by day of the week. Read closely, the ten years of data from 2014 to 2024 tell a much bigger story than "religion is declining." They show a genuine third option emerging between the church and the registry office — and it's already bigger than most people realise.

The headline: Catholic ceremonies have been cut in half

In 2014, 13,071 couples married in a Roman Catholic ceremony — 59.3% of all weddings in the State. By 2024, that number had fallen to 6,425, just 31.6% of all weddings, a drop of 50.8% in a single decade.

Civil registrations, by contrast, grew modestly over the same period — from 6,167 to 6,743, a 9.3% rise — and became the single most common ceremony type overall in 2024. But look only at opposite-sex couples, which is where the historic Catholic-versus-civil contest actually plays out, and the race is essentially a dead heat: 6,425 Catholic ceremonies against 6,392 civil ceremonies, a gap of just 33 weddings nationwide.

What most coverage of this data missed

Most of the reporting on the 2024 figures stopped at "Catholic ceremonies are down, civil ceremonies are up." That's true, but it skips the more interesting move: the growth isn't only going to the registry office. A cluster of ceremony types that sit outside both the church and plain civil registration — Humanist, Spiritualist Union of Ireland, and OneSpirit — has been growing far faster than either.

Individually, Humanist (+68.4%) and Spiritualist Union of Ireland (+76.6%) ceremonies are well-known growth stories. OneSpirit's rise, from a base of just 47 ceremonies in 2014 to 1,085 in 2024, is the single biggest mover in the entire dataset in relative terms. What almost nobody has pointed out is what happens when you add those three together.

The third way: from 8% to nearly 1 in 5 weddings

Humanist, Spiritualist Union of Ireland, and OneSpirit ceremonies share a common thread that neither Catholic ceremonies nor plain civil registration share: they are performed by an independently registered solemniser, at a venue and in a form chosen by the couple, with a ceremony script written specifically for them — while still being a fully legal marriage under the Civil Registration Act 2004. Added together, here is what happens to their combined share of all Irish weddings:

That's a two-and-a-half-times increase in market share in ten years, at a time when the overall number of Irish weddings was actually falling. Put another way: in 2014, roughly 1 in 12 Irish couples chose this kind of ceremony. By 2024, it was close to 1 in 5 — nearly as common as choosing a plain civil registration was back in 2014, and now bigger in raw numbers than every wedding held in a Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, or other minority Christian denomination ceremony combined.

This is the category Edel works in. As a solemniser registered through Celebrant Academy Ireland and associated with the Anam Cara Fellowship, every ceremony she performs — wedding, handfasting, vow renewal — sits in exactly this space: legally binding, but written from nothing rather than read from a book.

Why the "third way" is growing: couples are marrying later, with more to say

The CSO data offers a clue as to why. The average age at marriage has risen sharply over the same decade — brides from 33.0 to 35.9, grooms from 35.0 to 37.7. Same-sex couples marry later again, at an average of 39.7 (women) and 40.7 (men).

Couples marrying in their late thirties and early forties, often after years — sometimes decades — of building a life together, tend to arrive at ceremony planning with a specific story already lived, not a blank slate. A fixed civil script, however efficient, rarely has room for the complications, in-jokes, blended families, or losses that a couple in their late thirties has usually already accumulated. A ceremony written from scratch does. That, more than any single ideological shift, looks like the practical engine behind the growth in independently-solemnised ceremonies: not a rejection of religion so much as a demand for specificity that neither the church nor the registry office was built to offer.

Where in Ireland the church still holds the line

The national picture hides real regional variation. By county, the highest proportions of Catholic ceremonies in 2024 were in Longford (67.2%), Leitrim (61.6%), and Mayo (61.0%) — all comfortably above the national rate of 31.6%. Mayo's position on that list is notable for anyone working, as Edel does, across Galway, Clare and Mayo: even in a county where Catholic ceremonies still account for well over half of all weddings, the national trend suggests a fast-growing minority of couples locally are actively looking for the same legally-recognised, personally-written alternative that is now approaching one in five weddings nationally.

When Irish couples actually marry

A few smaller findings from the same release are useful for anyone in the middle of planning:

• August is the most popular month for opposite-sex marriages; September is most popular for same-sex marriages.
• Friday is the single most popular day of the week to marry.
• January is the quietest month for weddings of any kind — worth considering if you want more flexibility on venue and solemniser availability.
• The overall marriage rate has fallen from 4.8 per 1,000 population in 2014 to 3.8 per 1,000 in 2024, tracking the decline in total ceremony numbers even as the population has grown.

If a summer Friday is non-negotiable, book early: solemnisers who write bespoke ceremonies tend to take a limited number of dates per weekend, and peak-season Fridays are the first to go. For any ceremony type, 6 to 12 months' notice gives the most room to plan properly; couples marrying outside August, or on a weekday, often find far more availability at short notice.

What this means if you're planning a ceremony

The data doesn't say couples are becoming less spiritual, or even necessarily less religious — Catholic ceremonies remain the single largest religious category, and in parts of the west and midlands they're still the clear majority choice. What it shows is that a specific format — a legally-registered independent solemniser writing a ceremony from the ground up — has gone from a niche choice to a mainstream one in the space of a decade, and is still growing faster than either of the two options either side of it.

If you're weighing up a church ceremony, a civil registration appointment, and something else — this is the "something else" the numbers say a rapidly growing number of Irish couples are choosing, and it's worth understanding exactly what it involves before you decide.

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