Iona Statistics

During the week, a graphic put together by Ciarán Reilly was widely shared, which analysed the frequency of words used on the website of the right-wing lobby group, the Iona Institute.

The graph purported to show that, far from their claim of being concerned with everything that could negatively impact ‘the family’, the Iona Instutite have a rather narrower focus. The Iona Institute hit back with a chart of their own, which they claimed gave a more balanced impression of their interests.

So, it seems that The Iona Institute is most concerned with issues that affect traditional religious marriage? Not quite.

Google also allow you to search for pages that do not contain specific words. This is the search for Iona Institute pages that contain the word ‘marriage‘, which they claim shows that ‘traditional’ marriage is their primary concern. But this is the same search again, except excluding pages that mention ‘gay‘ and ‘same-sex‘.

It turns out that 60 per cent of the Iona pages containing the word marriage are in fact references to same-sex marriage – and that could well be an underestimate, because many of the pages are blog headline pages, some of which contain the word marriage, but the article they lead to discusses marriage equality.

So, when Iona talks about marriage, 60 per cent of the time they are talking about gay marriage.