Third Of Irish Births 'Outside Marriage'

It has been revealed that a third of Ireland's births were outside of wedlock, according to a statistical 'Yearbook', published today.

The data appeared in The Statistical Yearbook of Ireland, published today, giving an overview of how Ireland fared in 2010.

Publishing the document to coincide with the first World Statistics Day, the Central Dublin's Statistics Office (CSO) said the Yearbook presented a comprehensive picture of Ireland by providing detailed information, tables and graphs across a wide range of topics.

However, in it's figures for births in the State, the document said that in 2009 there were 74,278 births, with a third of these outside marriage.

The yearbook also revealed that cohabiting couples was "by far the fastest-growing type of family unit", rising in number from 77,600 in 2002 to 121,800 in 2006.

Among it's other more significant findings, the CSO document said that in the three years to 2009, the population rose by a further 5.2% to 4.5 million, while the number of births has risen fairly steadily since 2001.

The yearbook includes information on population, births, deaths, labour force, education, health, crime, the economy, industry, housing the environment and others.

In the workplace, the statistics found that employment fell from 2.1 million in 2008 to 1.9 million in 2009, and was the first major fall in 16 years.

This corresponded to the number of unemployed people more than doubling between 2008 and 2009 with 264,600 people unemployed in 2009, compared with 126,700 in 2008 and a low of 69,400 in 2001.

The statistics also revealed that almost a third of a million days were lost due to industrial disputes in 2009, compared to only 4,000 in 2008 and represented the highest figure in 25 years.

(DW)