This article is from page 6 of the 2011-11-22 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 6 JPG
NO VENUE in Clare has been granted permission to host civil partnerships between same-sex couples despite a number of civil marriages between heterosexual couples having already taken place in the county.
North Clare lesbian couple Bernadette Kenny and Heidi Hummel became Clare’s first same-sex civil partnership earlier this year but were prevented from hosting a ceremony in Clare because they were told that it would take more than two years for a officer to be free to come to Clare to perform the ceremony.
Despite this however, Management at the Cliffs of Moher have confirmed to The Clare People that a heterosexual American couple were allowed to celebrate a civil marriage at the world famous tourist site in June of this year – just six months after the civil partnership and civil marriage legislation came into effect.
The procedure for having a samesex civil partnership and a heterosexual civil marriage outside of a registry office is the exact same and requires an officer from the Civil Registration Service in Limerick to inspect the venue for health and safety reasons before the go-ahead can be given.
“If we had wanted to use a venue in north Clare or somewhere in the Burren it would have been a two year waiting time – and we were no prepared to wait for that long,” Bernadette Kenny told The Clare People yesterday. “They have a big backlog at the moment but it meant that we had to have our ceremony at the back end of a hospital in Limerick. There is no venue in Clare which is registered for this sort of ceremony.
“It would have been great to do it at the Cliffs of Moher or some other location up in the Burren but it would have taken so much time. There is so much paperwork involved already, especially if one person has already been married and then divorced. So of the rules governing this are very antiquated.”
A spokesperson from the Department of Social Protection has confirmed that no civil partnerships registered in County Clare to date.
“A venue may only be approved at each individual request from a couple. As no civil partnership has been registered to have taken place in County Clare there is no venue approved for County Clare,” said the spokesman. The Clare People contacted the Civil Registration Service in Limerick in relation to this but no response was received at the time of going to press.