“Solemniser” is the official name for the official that registers your wedding with the Irish state, these solemnisers or “registrars” are either religious, civic or secular (the Humanist Association of Ireland being the only secular group registered). This analysis is simply a descriptive exercise of the register of solemnisers that the state provides in order to determine if the person officiating a wedding can officially do so in the eyes of the state.

Data source: Shapefile

Solemnisers

Ever wondered why so many couples seem to go with the Catholic Church for getting married, even though they have long since given up on religion? Well outside family pressures and cultural inertia, I’d imagine that it also has something to do with the following data…

## 
##     Civil Religious   Secular 
##       115      5763        24
## [1] "Ratio of religious to secular + civil solemnisers:"
## [1] 41.46043
## Source: local data frame [10 x 2]
## 
##                         Nominating_Body count_of_body
##                                   (chr)         (int)
## 1                 Roman Catholic Church          4453
## 2                     Church of Ireland           359
## 3                    Jehovahs Witnesses           211
## 4                      Methodist Church           196
## 5                                   HSE           115
## 6                   Presbyterian Church            93
## 7             Assemblies of God Ireland            38
## 8                        Baptist Church            27
## 9  The Redeemed Christian Church of God            27
## 10    The Spiritualist Union of Ireland            26

For every civil or secular solemniser you can ask to officiate your wedding, there are about 41 religious officials. I have no way of testng this but I would imagine the secular officials are a wee bit busier than the religious ones. Looking at the top 10 list is also telling, the Catholic Church makes up more than the other 9 of them combined.

## [1] "Percentage of solemnisers that are registered with the Roman Catholic Church."
## [1] "75.4%"

Looking at the total figures, the Roman Catholic Church makes up the vast majority of the solemnisers in the country. As an atheist, and knowing that Ireland is rapidly becoming a post-religious country, I find this a tad depressing.

Geographical View

Finally I wanted to have a shot at some geographical output which I’d never had a chance to do before. The map below uses the leaflet package and simply shows the number of registered Solemnisers in each county of the Republic of Ireland. Dublin obviously dominates.