Ireland will vote to end a ban on divorce in a referendum next month that points to the waning power of the embattled Irish Roman Catholic church, according to an opinion poll in the Irish Times.
It showed that 61 percent of the electorate would vote to end the ban in the Nov. 24 referendum while 30 percent would oppose it and nine percent had no opinion.If approved, the vote would lead the way for separated Irish couples to divorce and remarry, a right denied them by a constitutional ban on divorce put in place at the founding of the state seven decades ago.
It would also indicate a weakening of the authority of the Roman Catholic church, which is beset by a series of scandals concerning child sex abuse by some of the country's 6,800 priests.
The church is at the forefront of efforts to secure a "no" vote in the referendum, but the poll showed that support for the ending of the divorce ban had slipped only four points in the past two months.
The church was instrumental in getting voters to reject lifting the divorce ban in a similar referendum in 1986 which was defeated by a 67 percent majority.
But the Irish Times said the latest poll showed that voters were likely to end the ban and that 86 percent of those surveyed had made up their minds on how they would vote.
The failure of the 1986 referendum was put down by many commentators to a campaign by the anti-divorce lobby suggesting that separated couples would lose rights to joint property.
This was thought to be especially influential in rural areas where voters were worried about losing their farms, which are in many cases the sole source of local income.
But since 1986 governments have put in place legislation on the division of property owned by separated couples, which has put a financial foundation under proposed divorce legislation.
The anti-divorce lobby will launch its official campaign against the proposed lifting of the ban in Dublin Monday but an unofficial campaign has been underway for weeks.
Prominent churchmen have argued that divorce is morally wrong and will destroy family life. They have also cited statistics showing that divorced men are prone to suicide.
Under the proposed legislation, separated couples will have to show that they have lived apart for four out of the previous five years to be divorced.
At present divorce is only possible if the church annuls the marriage or if couples seek a divorce in another country. Remarriage, technically, constitutes adultery.
In the latest scandal to hit the Catholic establishment, the church admitted this week that it had paid compensation to a man who was raped, buggered and abused by a priest when he was an altar boy aged between nine and 11 years in the 1970s.
One of the biggest scandals brought down a coalition government in 1994 when the Labor Party pulled out in protest at the handling of extradition warrants for a suspected pedophile priest.
The priest, Brendan Smyth, was jailed for four years in Northern Ireland for having abused children over a long period, triggering a wave of allegations of similar offenses against several priests.