{"id":41,"date":"0001-12-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"0001-12-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/?p=73"},"modified":"0001-12-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"0001-12-05T00:00:00","slug":"lay-wedding-solemnisers-oversee-more-ceremonies-letter-from-john-colgan-in-irish-examiner-on-27-july-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/0001\/12\/05\/lay-wedding-solemnisers-oversee-more-ceremonies-letter-from-john-colgan-in-irish-examiner-on-27-july-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Lay wedding solemnisers oversee more ceremonies &#8211; Letter from John Colgan in Irish Examiner on 27 July 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Lay wedding solemnisers oversee more ceremonies<\/strong>nnMonday, July 27, 2015n<\/p>\n<div class=\"text_exposed_show\">nnThe recently published 2014 report of Registrar General, Kieran Feely, relies on speculation about \u2018marriages of convenience\u2019 based on unattributed \u2018anecdotal evidence\u2019 \u2014 as near to an oxymoron as one will get \u2014 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 (\u20ac200 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\u2019t make any judgment about couples getting the jitters solely because they they\u2019re 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 \u2013 who don\u2019t do weekend work \u2013 managed to marry 58.2 each.nAnd the 14 persons accredited by the Humanists\u2019 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\u2019 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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lay wedding solemnisers oversee more ceremoniesnnMonday, July 27, 2015n nnThe recently published 2014 report of Registrar General, Kieran Feely, relies on speculation about \u2018marriages of convenience\u2019 based on unattributed \u2018anecdotal evidence\u2019 \u2014 as near to an oxymoron as one will get \u2014 for concluding that because civil marriages are increasing they are partly accounted for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cscs.ie\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}