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The number of marriages that are ending in divorce in Ireland has risen exponentially over the past decade according to the latest reports from the country’s Central Statistics Office. Ireland created divorce legislation in 1995. The first census following this legislation having been passed was conducted in 2002 when 35,059 had been through a divorce. Now, that figure stands at over half a million. The good news for Ireland, however, is that the number of couples choosing to marry is also on the rise, with the number of married couples currently residing in Ireland having grown by 10% since 2006. It would also appear that divorce does not deter people from marriage, either. 39 per cent of men and 28 per cent of women that have previously been through a divorce have since remarried. As one would expect, men are significantly more likely than women to find themselves living in a childless home following a divorce. 78 per cent of divorced or separated men found themselves living without children compared with just 44.5 per cent of females. Liberalisation has also led to far more Irish couples choosing to cohabit with 143,600 couples now choosing to live together before marriage – an 18 per cent increase on the figures collected in 2002. In spite of the country’s growing divorce rate, the vast majority of families in Ireland are still marital families, however, with 70 per cent of the 870,000 families residing in Ireland adhering to this model.