Nearly one in four marriages, 23 per cent, carried out in Ireland in 2007 were civil ceremonies, new CSO data have revealed.

The figure is being driven up by divorce and a decline in religious observance. A third of civil marriages involved at least one divorced person.

However, the civil marriage rate is still much lower than in the UK where a minority of marriages take place in church.

According to the CSO figures, of the 22,756 marriages registered in 2007, 16,854, or 74 per cent were Catholic marriage ceremonies (74%), while 5,146, or 23 per cent, were civil marriages.

Two per cent were Church of Ireland ceremonies and the remaining one per cent were made up of Presbyterian, Methodist, Jewish and other ceremonies.

The figures also show the rise in the number of civil ceremonies has stabilised. Between 1996 and 2002 the percentage of civil marriages rose from six per cent of all marriages to 18 per cent.

In more recent years, the number of civil marriages has remained somewhat more constant at 22 per cent of marriages in 2005, and 23 per cent in both 2006 and 2007.

Of the 5,146 civil marriages in 2007, 1,872 (36 per cent) involved at least one divorced person.

There were 21,095 (92.7 per cent) grooms and 21,319 (93.7 per cent) brides marrying for the first time in 2007.

Divorced men accounted for 6.5 per cent (1,486) of grooms while divorced women accounted for 5.6 per cent (1,283) of brides.

There were 2,320 marriages involving at least one divorced person in 2007, including 449 marriages where both parties were divorced. Civil ceremonies accounted for 1,872 of these marriages, 330 were Roman Catholic ceremonies, and 118 were other religious ceremonies.

And civil marriage ceremonies were the most common form of ceremony for grooms aged 45 and over and for brides aged 40 and over.

In marriage ceremonies, where the bride was aged 40 or over, civil marriages accounted for 65 per cent of ceremonies, while the comparable figure for grooms in the same age category was just over 54 per cent.

At a regional level, over 30 per cent of grooms and brides in the Dublin region had civil marriages. By contrast, 17 per cent of grooms in the Midlands and Western regions and over 16 per cent of brides living in the Western region, had civil marriages.

Just over 40 per cent of grooms residing in Galway City had civil marriages. By contrast, only 10.5 per cent of brides living in County Donegal had civil marriages.

Over 8.4 per cent of grooms in the South-East region were divorced men, the highest proportion in the country. In contrast, only 4.9 per cent of grooms in the Midland region were divorced. For brides the highest proportion of divorcees was in the Mid-East region (7.0 per cent) while the lowest proportion was in the West (4.3 per cent).

Almost 19 per cent (4,277) of all marriages involved the bride and groom being of the same socio-economic group.

Almost 27 per cent of grooms and just over 27 per cent of brides in the ‘higher professional’ category married persons in the same socio-economic group.

Meanwhile, almost 25 per cent of grooms and 26 per cent of brides in the ‘employer and managers’ socio-economic group married a spouse in the same group and 21.5 per cent of grooms and 21.4 per cent of brides in the ‘other non-manual’ married within their own group.