What’s your most controversial opinion? **Read OP** **Mod Note in Post #3372**

...maybe hes just friendly to them!

Most marriages would be so much happier and healthier places for the kids , relations etc if people were allowed to have at least one hall pass each year . Go and ride someone in a different county not Tina from down the road .

The idea of one sexual partner for 40 years plus goes against all human instincts and the idea is the reason for so many failed marriages

Some "rival families" should be paid not to have so many kids.

I think we are heading for a financial crisis in 50 - 100 years time, the only people in Ireland having more than two kids, are travellers and generational social welfare families, the country won't only have fewer young people to pay for our pensions, the ratio of traveller and social welfare kids, to working peoples kids, will be multiples of what it is now, so a large minority of those young people will also be reliant on social welfare.

My controversial opinion? People who arent willing to work, or are unable to, should not be compensated for having large families like they are now, yes society needs to look after them, but if they can't afford kids, then they shouldn't have them, in my experience the vast majority of kids born into a family of non workers, are unable or un willing to work when adults.

Two university educated professionals in this house.

No travelers or generational social welfare people around the house.

But look, four kids.

And I know plenty more like us.

Would you accept you are the minority?

It’s a good thing the only criteria for this thread is that it is an opinion, there doesn’t actually have to be any evidence to support it, because for your opinion, there’s none -

• 62,192 - The number of families with 4 or more children
• 4,352 - The number of families with 6 or more children

Cohabiting couples were more likely to have just one child with 45 per cent of cohabiting couples falling into this category. Among married couples with children, one-child families accounted for less than one third of the total.

Overall, cohabiting couples with children had an average of 1.83 children, while the figure for married couples was 2.09 children.

The social class structure of couples varied according to whether they were married or cohabiting, and whether or not they had children as can be seen in Figure 2.5.

For married couples, those with children tended to belong to the higher social classes. 57 per cent of these families belonged to the higher classes (1 to 3), compared with 50.9 per cent of married couples without children.

The opposite pattern emerges for cohabiting couples. Those without children are much more likely to belong to social classes 1 to 3 (66.1%), while 44.8 per cent of cohabiting couples with children belong to these groups.

The number of one parent families stood at 218,817 in 2016 of which 189,112 were mothers and 29,705 were fathers. The majority, 125,840, had just one child.

Figure 2.7 shows the distribution of one parent families by principal economic status alongside the equivalent breakdown for heads of two-parent families.

Only 47.8 per cent of single parents were at work, compared with 70.2 per cent for heads of two-parent families. 13.1 per cent of one parent families were unemployed. For couples, this figure stood at 6.9 per cent.

Those looking after the home or family were also prevalent among one parent families, accounting for 17.7 per cent, although this was unevenly spread between men and women. Only 4 per cent of one parent fathers were homemakers, compared with 19.8 per cent of one parent mothers.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp4hf/cp4hf/fmls/

I was down at an appointment last week registering to get married, which costs €200. Happened to see on the price list that it cost only €20 to get a birth certificate and I believe it is free to register a birth.

My controversial opinion, if they had a €1000 fee to register a birth (and if you needed a registered birth to apply for certain welfare payments), there'd be far less single women having babies just for the mickey money.

The Social welfare office would pay the 1000 euro for them like they do for everything else they want.

Wow, that's a lot of words to basically say you agree with me. The average family size is less than two children, the other poster said they have four children, and I said that he is in the minority, your stats back that up. I don't see any breakdown on traveller families, or two parent non working, multi generational families.

I can fully understand why a single parent wouldn't work, it doesn't make financial sense with the current social welfare system.

To me, it stands to reason, if the average family is less than two children, and travellers/social welfare recipient's are having disproportionately larger families (because the social welfare sytem rewards them for doing so) then in a few generations there are going to be a lot more young people relying on social welfare than there are now.

Let's just agree to disagree and I'll just leave this stat from the CSO that's actually relevant to the point I was making:

"Irish traveller households comprising of a married couple with children had an average of 5.3 persons per household compared with 4.1 for the general population"

Mrs Brown's Boys should be taken off the air for good ... for the past 12 years we have been martyred with this rubbish ...

A final ...

Trump and Netanyahu belong in prison ...

Its a thread about controversial opinions ,If everyone agreed they'd be in the wrong thread ,