75% of children live with two married parents
One in five of the country’s 1.5m under-21s lives with a lone parent, while 6% live with cohabiting parents.
The ERSI statistical study of Irish families reveals that 2.5% of children live in families where there is at least one stepchild, and that 1.3% are stepchildren.
More than half of all step-families consist of one stepchild with one of more younger step-siblings, the oldest of whom is about eight years old.
Just over 6% of children live with cohabiting couples. For almost one third of these, one or both partners have previously been married.
The study, based on micro data from Census 2006, shows that 53,606 of the 1.15m children are living in second union families, where one or both partners have been previously married.
The lone mother family is the second most common family type. While 18% of children live with lone parents, 16% are with lone mothers.
In more than 50% of cases where children are with lone mothers, those mothers have never been married.
Among children with lone fathers, two thirds of the fathers in question are separated or divorced.
Re-marriage following divorce is relatively unusual in Ireland — in 2007/08 only Poland had a smaller proportion of marriages where one or both of the partners had previously been divorced.
International comparisons show that Ireland has a low level of second relationships and remarriage relative to other developed nations, but a high rate of unmarried lone parenthood.
According to the report, both may be connected to couples delaying forming relationships, something that improves the chances of relationships lasting but results in more single adults at a chance of having a birth outside a stable relationship.
It points out that the “serial family” — in which partners form a family, leave it and then form another — is relatively rare in Ireland.
The more general pattern is that people make one attempt at family formation and persist with it but are slow to make a second attempt where the relationship fails.
People also tend to wait until their late 20s or early 30s before making their first foray into partnership, which also helps explain why the survival rate of partnerships, indicated by the low rate of marital breakdown, is reasonably high.
* Number of children in Ireland: 1.15 million
* Proportion who live with two married parents: 75%
* Proportion who live with a lone parent: 18%
* Proportion who live with cohabiting parents: 6%
* Proportion who live in step-families: 2.5%
* Proportion who are step-children: 1.3%
