IRELAND
Irish Independent
Maeve Sheehan
PUBLISHED
07/08/2016
It seemed like tabloid heaven – a Catholic archbishop talking about a “gay culture” at the national seminary and rumours of student priests using gay dating app Grindr.
Archbishop of Dublin Diar- muid Martin explained why he had decided to pull his seminarians out of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to study in Rome instead.
“I just wasn’t happy with Maynooth,” he said last Monday after the Irish Independent brought the story into the national consciousness. “There seems to be an atmosphere of strange goings-on there – it seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around.”
On RTE news on Wednesday he said the allegations in these letters included claims that students were on Grindr and that the authorities there were dismissing anyone who tried to complain.
He described a “poisonous” atmosphere in which anonymous letters flourished.
As one of four archbishops in Ireland, Dr Martin is a trustee of St Patrick’s College and was a recipient of these poison pen letters.
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