The Irish county with the highest divorce rate is one you’d never expect

You might be thinking that marital breakdown is a big-city phenomenon - but you'd be wrong.

It's been revealed that the county with the most divorce per capita is Carlow. The county's rate of 116 divorces per 100,000 of the population is the highest in the country. Just behind Carlow is Dublin, where the rate of divorce is 104.8 per 100,000. These counties come in far ahead of the national average of 87.4. In third and fourth place are Tipperary (99.7) and Clare (95.2), while Louth is the fifth-worst for divorce with a rate of 94.25, all well above the nationwide figure. Those statistics, compiled from data from the Courts Service, refer to the number of applications for divorce in 2016. There were a total of 4,100 divorce applications that year. The county with the lowest rate of divorce in the country is Kilkenny, which borders Carlow. Kilkenny had a rate of just 45.4 per 100,000 people in 2016. The other counties with the lowest rates for divorce applications in 2016 were all mainly rural ones - Mayo, Leitrim, Monaghan and Roscommon. Meanwhile, there could be changes afoot for divorce law in Ireland. Currently, couples must be living apart for a minimum of four years but that time period could be cut in half. The Irish Examiner reports that a referendum on reducing the separation period to two years is planned.