by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Britain’s total fertility rate has just fallen again, to 1.39 children per woman in 2025, a new record low. The collapse of marriage – the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the gold standard that binds a child to both biological parents – is dragging the figures down with it. David Quinn of the Iona Institute joins me this week, to trace a similar trajectory in Ireland.
Quinn has been describing this same trend in Ireland for years. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office confirmed earlier this month that the country’s marriage rate has fallen to 3.6 per 1,000 population in 2025, the lowest on record outside Covid. Catholic wedding ceremonies have more than halved in a decade, from 13,071 in 2014 to 6,425 in 2024. The average Irish groom is now 38, the bride 36, a decade older than couples in the 1980s. “The… life script now”, Quinn says, “is delay, delay, delay, delay, enjoy your freedom, and then suddenly do a kind of abrupt about-turn and say now it’s time to get married”, but it’s too late. Christians, he points out, are not the ones who withhold from fifteen-year-old girls the basic fact that fertility falls sharply after thirty. “Who’s withholding the facts of life?”
Quinn’s interpretation is sharper than the headline. The collapse of Catholic ceremonies, he argues, reflects Ireland’s broader secularisation, not the abandonment of marriage by the religious. Within this more secular Ireland, the minority who still practise their faith continue to marry, and continue to have children. “Social liberalism has moved into a dead end demographically and in other ways, and these religious people, they’re not in a demographic dead end,” he says. Over time, ageing secular societies will face the unavoidable question, in his words: “Why have they got strong families and we don’t?”