Lay wedding solemnisers oversee more ceremonies – Letter from John Colgan in Irish Examiner on 27 July 2015

nnThe recently published 2014 report of Registrar General, Kieran Feely, relies on speculation about ‘marriages of convenience’ based on unattributed ‘anecdotal evidence’ — as near to an oxymoron as one will get — for concluding that because civil marriages are increasing they are partly accounted for by marriages of convenience.nEffectively Mr Feely is, whether wittingly or not, casting a slur on the integrity of civil and what he calls secular solemnisers of marriage for allowing folk to marry to secure Irish nationality or rights of habitation here.nnWhile the fraction of persons who follow up (€200 fee) notices of intention to marry with marriage has remained stubbornly about 80% where one of the parties is a foreigner of some sort, the report publishes no comparable data for when both parties are Irish citizens.nSo one can’t make any judgment about couples getting the jitters solely because they they’re embarking on a scam.nnOf interest is the productivity of marriage solemnisers. Of the 5,554 solemnisers who are clergy, they managed to solemnise 2.7 marriages each last year. Whereas the 106 solemnisers in the employ of the HSE – who don’t do weekend work – managed to marry 58.2 each.nAnd the 14 persons accredited by the Humanists’ Association married an average of 63.9 couples each in 2014. I am informed by one of these 14 persons that he and his peers receive two or three requests a day to marry folk and have to turn many down.nnWhen the Humanists’ Association were allowed by law to accredit solemnisers, the Registrar General sought to ration them to one solemniser, on the basis that they only had a few hundred members!nnThis is not about customer satisfaction.nJohn ColgannDublin Road Streetnn