The other day I was on the Joe Nash radio show on Limerick Today. Under discussion were new figures showing that in the first quarter of this year, a massive 62 percent of children in Limerick were born outside marriage.

The national average is around one in three, and that is high in itself. Cork city comes closest to Limerick city with a rate of 48.5 percent in the first quarter.

The figure for Limerick city might prove to be a blip because in the last quarter of last year, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was 45 percent, so maybe it will drop back down, although 45 percent is still nothing to write home about.

In any event, the discussion on the Joe Nash show revolved around the 62 percent figure and before I went on air the show ran a vox pop with Limerick city residents. None that I can recall was the least worried about the figure which is close to the level found in the poorest American ghettoes.

Some appeared to labour under the misapprehension that most of those children born outside marriage were born to cohabiting parents, when the true figure is fewer than half (39 percent), and none were aware that cohabitation is notoriously unstable breaking up much more often than marriage.

Others believed it didn’t matter if the father wasn’t around because the extended family of the mother could make up for his absence. (Who needs fathers?!)

Still others believed it was “old-fashioned” to believe parents should be married before they have children, and at least one respondent dismissed marriage as ‘just a piece of paper’.

Regular visitors to this website won’t need to be told that all the research shows that in general children do best when raised by their married biological parents.

However, very few people seem to be aware of this research and therefore they don’t believe in the institution of marriage and therefore they don’t think it matters a damn whether children are born inside or outside of marriage even though it emphatically does matter.

The need for a big , national pro-marriage education campaign has never been more obvious.