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ALMOST HALF OF couples planning to get married would have done so before now if not for the housing crisis, a national survey has found.
Sixty percent of couples planning to have children would have done so before now if it wasn’t for the housing situation, according to a survey by polling company Amárach for Accord, the Catholic relationship counselling service.
The Catholic Church published the findings this afternoon as the annual St Valentine’s Mass for engaged and married couples took place in the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Whitefriar Street in Dublin city centre, where famous relics of St Valentine are held.
Model Louise O’Reilly and her fiancé David Lovett were one of two couples to receive a blessing from Bishop Denis Nulty, Bishop of Kildare & Leighlin in Whitefriar Street this afternoon.
O’Reilly and Lovett have been together for almost 14 years and recently had a baby daughter together. They plan to get married in 2026. She is a well known model, as well as a blogger and influencer under the handle ‘Style Me Curvy’.
“The housing crisis as a whole is definitely impacting people getting married at the moment,” O’Reilly said.
“It’s a very difficult climate at the moment for an awful lot of people, not just young Irish couples, but people all across Ireland. It’s a situation that doesn’t seem to be improving, and I can’t see getting better anytime soon,” she told The Journal.
O’Reilly said they felt honoured to be invited to Whitefriar Street for today’s blessing.
“We’re both quite religious people, so the fact that we’re here today, especially Valentine’s week, is really special,” she said.
Tony Shanahan, director of Accord, said young people’s hopes of a married life and children “needs to be underpinned by certainty in a functioning and affordable housing market”.
Accord also published data today showing a decline in the number of couple participating in its marriage preparation courses – typically undertaken before marriage in a Catholic Church – from 7,281 couples in 2023 to 5,194 in 2024.
Bishop Nulty noted in his homily that the numbers celebrating church weddings “continue to slip”.
“We need to do much more to promote the sacrament,” he told the congregation today.
Margaret Gleeson and Jimmy Moynihan were also blessed this afternoon. They first connected through the magazine Ireland’s Own as pen-friends.
They are both widowed. They will get married in May having found love again with each other.
“I thank God for meeting my fiancé, Jimmy,” Gleeson said.
“I’m privileged to be here with my fiancé to get the blessing of Bishop Nulty on our engagement.”
Valentine’s week is busy in Whitefriar Street, with people coming to attend blessings or to pray for engaged and married couples.
“Quite often young engaged couples come in and want the rings blessed or married couples looking to have their rings blessed,” Nulty told The Journal.
Nulty noted in his homily that St Valentine’s Day commemorates a martyred saint who died on the Flaminian Way in Rome in 269AD after secretly marrying two Christian couples. The reliquary in Whitefriar Street was the gift of Pope Gregory XVI to a Carmelite priest in 1836.
He joked that with Whitefriar Street’s St Valentine’s shrine facing a shrine of St Jude, patron saint of lost causes, “there is always a fall back!”
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