Couples spending average of €25,000 on weddings

THE average Irish wedding costs €25,000 and has become another example of the wider consumerist values that seem to be embracing Irish life, according to a leading sociologist.

Marriage remained a major rite of passage and was still marked by elaborate ceremonies, senior sociology lecturer at University College Cork, Dr Linda Connolly, said.

Research by one of her students on brides found that the average cost of an Irish wedding was €25,000, Dr Connolly told the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, yesterday.

“The custom in Ireland that the bride’s father pays for the wedding is, of course, reflective of more elaborate formal exchanges of economic resources which took place in the past in, for example, the ‘match’,” Dr Connolly said.

But today families were no longer based on lifelong marriage and the “blended family” with stepchildren was emerging with the advent of divorce, she added.

Marriage in Ireland has decreased in recent years, the 2002 Census showing 47.1% of population were married, 42.5% single and the remaining 10.4% widowed or separated/divorced, Dr Connolly said.

Ironically, however, divorce does not signal the decline of marriage. “One of the main reasons why people get divorced in the first place is to get married again,” she added.

Motherhood was allegedly one of the most valued social institutions in Ireland, but Dr Connolly said the State support for childcare, maternity leave and paternity leave was quite at odds with this image and Ireland was way behind the rest of Europe.

“In my new recent status as a working mother, I have been appalled at the gap between rhetoric and reality in Ireland,” she said.

Dr Connolly said she supported the proposal to update the Constitution from regarding the woman’s role in the home as primary, to giving special recognition to “persons” caring for others within the home.

The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution (APOCC) is examining the Constitution to determine if the articles on the family should be changed to embrace the changes in Irish life.

But APOCC chairman Deputy Denis O’Donovan told the Merriman Summer School he declined to reveal how the family would be redefined in future.

“These issues are now before the Midnight Court - before the committee has made up its mind about them they must remain sub-judice and my lips are sealed,” he said.