2.2 Marital Status

The percentage breakdown in terms of marital status is shown in Figure 2, where it can be seen that over half of the women who took part (56%) are married and living with their husbands.  The second largest group are single (18%), followed by separated women (9%), with divorced and widowed women forming the two smallest groups at 5% each.

Figure 2.  Pie Chart illustrating the percentage breakdown of participants

(N = 100) by marital status.

2.3 Children

As can be seen from Table 2, the largest group of children (118) represented in this survey live with both parents, who are either married or living together.  Forty children live with their mothers only, while the others (8) are siblings of the respondents who still live at home.  More than one in three of the children (58) are in the 5-10 age group, closely followed by those (47) aged between 10 and 15.  Just over one fifth of the children (35) are under five years old.

2.4 Accommodation

One in three women live in rented accommodation, either from a local authority (18) or from a private landlord.  A fifth of the women in the sample are living in homes that are being purchased with a mortgage.  The apparently high number of homes declared to be 'owned outright' (38) in the present sample is, however, less than the national average in 1998 of just over 40% - and less again than the figures for the border counties in general, quoted as almost 56% of total households in the Statistical Yearbook of Ireland (2002).  Some of these homes are likely to have been inherited from a previous generation; others may have been purchased and/or built by couples who traditionally worked away from home for a number of years before returning to start a family.  With regard to inherited homes in particular, issues of repair, upkeep and modernisation (dropped from the current research due to pressures of time and space) frequently create further hardship, where incomes are insufficient to cover other, more basic, needs.