In Ireland, cohabitation is increasingly more popular. It has had a legal status here since 2011, although married couples still get more rights in terms of taxation, immigration and inheritance. Previously, there were also no shared parental rights - if a mother and father were simply living together, the father would have had to file paperwork with consent from the mother of his children so that he could codify his rights to his children under law. This meant that if the mother died and her parents hated the father, they could take the kids from him because the law did not recognise the children as his own, unless he’d already established paternity over the children while the mother was alive. Thankfully, this changed in 2016 - since then, if the couple were living together for at least 12 months, then any child born into the relationship is the legitimate child of both the mam and the dad. The father has full legal rights and if the mother were to die, he gets sole custody. He still has to have lived with the mother for 12 months, including one moth after the child is born, to be the child’s legal father, which is ridiculous, but it still removes unnecessary bureaucracy and grants rights to the father and to his children. Also, cohabitating couples, same sex or opposite sex, have had the same adoption rights as married couples since 2017. In essence, if I want a man and to have children with him, I don’t need to get married as long as my partner is an EU citizen.