Irish Birth certificates

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

They are patchy not just because some were destroyed by fire. If you were Catholic, you weren't worthy of a birth certificate until past the second half of the 19th century.

What utter rubbish! How on Earth did you ever come up with this piece of total mis-information? In Ireland compulsory registration of all births commences in 1864; prior to that time births (for all denominations) were recorded in parish registers. There was a fair amount of resistance to the compulsory registration of births (again by the clergy of all denominations) due to the fairly high percentage of illegitimate children born in Ireland (as many as one in three in some parishes).

One of the main stumbling blocks in Irish genealogy is the distinct lack of parish registers prior to 1864. These parish records were regarded as the property of the incumbent, and many were lost, simply allowed to deteriorate, or were wantonly destroyed.