Angelo (@angelobottone)

The Strange Rise of ‘Spiritual’ Weddings in Ireland Two years ago, while examining data on marriage in Ireland, I noticed a rise in what the Central Statistics Office classifies as ‘Other religious’ wedding ceremonies. At first, I assumed these ceremonies were being conducted mainly by Muslim, Hindu or other minority-faith clergy, reflecting Ireland’s changing population. But when I asked the CSO for a more detailed breakdown, the picture turned out to be very different. Many of these ceremonies were not being conducted by recognisable religious communities at all. They were being performed by groups that, in many cases, have no congregations in the ordinary sense, no parish life, and little resemblance to what most people would understand by a religion. They are, rather, ceremony providers, often offering highly personalised weddings as part of a wider commercial ecosystem around hotels and reception venues. This week, the CSO released publicly, for the first time, some of the more detailed figures it had previously supplied to me on request. I welcome the fact that this topic is receiving official attention, but I also find the new CSO release perplexing in two respects. First, it compares 2024 with 2014, even though the CSO is due to publish the overall 2025 marriage figures on 5 May. It would surely have made sense to wait and include the most recent data. Second, the comparison is not always like with like. The CSO’s headline 2024 figures combine opposite-sex and same-sex marriages, while 2014 necessarily refers only to opposite-sex marriages. The CSO’s own data page links separately to datasets for opposite-sex and same-sex marriages, and that distinction matters. In the analysis that follows, unless otherwise stated, I compare like with like and refer to opposite-sex marriages. One of the most surprising discoveries was the scale of the Spiritualist Union of Ireland. In 2024, it performed 1,374 opposite-sex marriage ceremonies. For comparison, that is more than seven times the number of Church of Ireland ceremonies, which stood at 193. But what is the Spiritualist Union of Ireland? The organisation was set up by Tom Colton, a self-described spiritual medium. Colton has a serious criminal history. The Irish Times reported that he was disqualified from acting as a company director following a 2014 conviction for the theft of €322,000 from an elderly couple while acting as their accountant, with the trial judge describing his conduct as “extraordinarily dishonest and fraudulent”. That conviction triggered an automatic disqualification from acting as a company director. However, according to the Irish Times, Tom Colton later pleaded guilty to breaching that disqualification by acting as a director and legal secretary of Grá Agus Solas ULC, a company providing celebrant services for weddings, funerals and baby naming ceremonies, while disqualified. He received a nine-month suspended sentence and consented to a ten-year directorship disqualification. Grá Agus Solas, trading as Spiritual Ceremonies, is not the same legal entity as the Spiritualist Union of Ireland. The Spiritualist Union is a separate company and solemnising body. However, the two are closely linked in practice: Grá Agus Solas/Spiritual Ceremonies operates as a ceremony-services platform, its celebrants include officiants of the Spiritualist Union of Ireland, and company records place Grá Agus Solas at the Spiritualist Union’s address. Despite Colton’s convictions, Spiritualist ceremonies continue to form a major part of Ireland’s marriage landscape, but they are only one part of a much broader and rapidly expanding ecosystem of pseudo-religious ceremony providers. Over the past few years, my research has documented the emergence of a wide range of organisations offering what might loosely be called ‘alternative spiritual’ ceremonies. These groups present themselves as religious or spiritual bodies, but in most cases they do not resemble traditional religions in any meaningful sense. Among the most prominent are organisations such as Entheos and OneSpirit Ireland, which together officiate at a large and growing number of weddings each year. OneSpirit Ireland says its interfaith ministers have been active in Ireland since 2008 and that they offer ‘unique and bespoke legal weddings’, funerals, naming ceremonies and spiritual counselling. It also states plainly: ‘We Have No Church.’ What is typically being offered is not membership in a religious community, but a service: a personalised ceremony, tailored to the couple’s preferences, and frequently designed to fit smoothly into the wedding venue and reception. More here: https://angelobottone.substack.com/p/the-strange-rise-of-spiritual-weddings