ALMOST ONE in six babies born in the second quarter of last year were to cohabiting couples, according to the Central Statistics Office (CS0), which has released such a breakdown for the first time.
The new data revealed that of the more than 17,100 total births registered in April, May and June 2007, 16.4 per cent (2,815) were to unmarried parents living together at the same address.
There were an additional 2,613 births outside marriage where the parents lived at different addresses or the father's details were not registered, while there were almost 11,700 (68.3 per cent) births to married parents.
The CSO said this is the first time that information regarding cohabitation has been disclosed following a thorough compilation of vital statistics records.
The highest percentage of births to cohabiting couples was in Waterford city (28 per cent) and the lowest such percentage was in Co Longford (10 per cent).
In general, the average age of mothers has risen steadily for the past 30 years.The average age of mothers for births registered in the second quarter of 2007 was 31.2 years, 0.1 years higher than the corresponding quarter in 2006. Of the 17,127 new arrivals over the three-month period in 2007, more boys were born (8,667) than girls (8,460) and the total is significantly higher than 1998 when 13,729 babies were registered in the same months.
The highest percentage of births outside marriage in quarter two of 2007 occurred in Limerick city, while the lowest percentage was in Cork county.
The second quarter 2007 report indicated that the highest percentages of births to cohabiting couples were to mothers aged from 20 to 24, and almost one in three mothers in this age category were cohabiting. By contrast, only one in 10 mothers aged between 35 and 39 were cohabiting.
For teenage mothers, 18 per cent of births were to cohabiting couples and 9 per cent were to married couples, with the remainder involving different parental addresses, or cases where the father's details were not registered.
The estimated population in April 2007 was 4,339,000.