IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
By Kim Bielenberg
PUBLISHED
06/08/2016
The hugely popular gay dating app Grindr is banned, or blocked, in countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This week, the embattled Irish Catholic hierarchy would be forgiven for wishing that it was also outlawed in Maynooth, the location of Ireland’s only seminary.
Grindr boasts that it is the world’s largest gay social network, enabling men to see pictures of “100 guys on a location-based grid … chat, make a date, and have some fun, anytime, any place”.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, this week announced that he was not sending students of the priesthood to the 200-year-old seminary at Maynooth. Part of the reason given was that some students in the seminary were allegedly using Grindr.
The dating app has become part of normal gay culture among two million users worldwide, in the same way as Tinder is used by heterosexuals to hook up online.
But in the eyes of Archbishop Martin, the app was “inappropriate for seminarians” as it was “something which would be fostering promiscuous sexuality”.
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