Tinder Is Losing Subscribers. The Irish Times Called It First: "Irish People Are Terrible On The Apps."
Let's start with a headline.
In February 2025, the Irish Times published a podcast and accompanying piece with the following title: "Online Dating Fatigue: 'Irish People Are Terrible on the Apps.'"1
Not the apps are terrible. Not the apps are failing. Irish people are terrible on the apps.
This is a specific observation, made by Irish people about Irish people, that gets at the precise and very Irish version of why Tinder is declining in this city. It's not just that the apps aren't working. It's that the apps are the wrong format for the culture using them.
Irish connection — the craic, the gift of the gab, the warm and unscripted conversation over a round — is a specifically in-person phenomenon. It is time-sensitive, spontaneous, and dependent on being in the same room. Irish people who are extraordinary over a pint in Rathmines are stilted and slow in a Hinge chat window. The app surfaces the wrong version of the person. The pub has always been better at this.
The Irish Times noticed. Ireland is responding. And the event at Foley's Bar on Merrion Row where someone shotgunned a beer in front of the crowd as their friend's live romantic pitch is the most specifically Irish piece of evidence that the in-person alternatives are working better than the apps ever did.
The Numbers Behind The Exit
Globally, the dating app market posted its first annual revenue decline in 2025 — falling 1.7% to $6 billion.2 Tinder paying users fell 8% year-over-year. Bumble revenue dropped nearly 10%.2 Match Group cut 13% of its workforce and launched an emergency turnaround plan while investing $60 million in AI features that are arriving too late to reverse a structural decline.
In the UK and Ireland specifically, the numbers are acute. UK dating app usage fell sharply in late 2024 and burnout is now widespread, with fears around AI-generated profiles further undermining trust.3 Irish Times research noted the same shift: app usage declining, in-person alternatives growing, and a cultural recognition building that the apps were delivering the wrong thing.
Ireland had 1.2 million online dating users in 2024 — a significant penetration rate for a country of 5.3 million people.4 And yet: 40% of Irish adults aged 20 to 39 are single, the marriage rate is falling, and multiple Irish Times features in 2024 and 2025 found the same consistent pattern: app users exhausted by time-wasting, ghosting, empty profiles, and the fundamental disconnect between who someone seems on a profile and who they are in person.5
Tracy, 33, interviewed in the Irish Times: "The apps are awful — empty profiles, dragging conversation out of people, and then you could be messaging people for weeks or going on a date and then they just ghost. I don't mind if it doesn't work out, but ghosting feels awful."5
This is not a complaint about the technology. It is a complaint about what the technology asks of people whose natural mode of connection is not text-based.
What The Apps Can't Do With Irish Social Culture
Here is the specific Dublin version of app failure, and it is different from every other city in this series.
The Irish Times' own research on in-person dating events in Ireland identified the pattern precisely: the events that are succeeding are the ones that let Irish people do what Irish people are actually good at. Talking. Performing. Showing up in a room and being themselves in real time. The pitch. The story. The craic.
One Irish organisation that has directly addressed the ghosting problem — as a policy rather than just a cultural value — is Conscious Connections, founded by Sinéad Téhéry Cronin. It runs events, workshops and retreats with a specific no-ghosting rule built into the experience. Facilitators have backgrounds in holistic counselling, mindfulness, yoga, and men's personal development work.5 It is for single people who have decided that the app mode — anonymous, consequence-free, low-accountability — is not the way they want to meet someone.
The no-ghosting rule is a policy. In a city where the apps specifically enabled ghosting — where there is no social cost to disappearing mid-conversation because the person on the other end has no community connection to you — making it an explicit rule of the social space is a direct response to the specific damage the apps did.
Then there is Pitch A Friend — and this needs to be described in full, because it is very specifically a response to the Irish dating app problem and very specifically Irish in its solution.
Pitch A Friend at Foley's Bar, Merrion Row
The event is simple in structure. Ten people show up and pitch their single friends to a room of interested singles. They have three minutes. They can use photos, videos, whatever they want.
The Irish Times documented what happened: "Some people pick a theme — we've had people come in and do a Shark Tank or Dragon's Den-style presentation selling the attributes and potential of their friend as if someone just invested in them. We've had people make a fake Amazon page as if the person were the product. We've had people show videos of them dancing, and sometimes we get a live show from the single person — we had someone shotgun a beer in front of the crowd."5
The event came to Foley's Bar on Merrion Row in November 2024. Sold out. The organiser noted specifically that Irish people's gift of the gab would make for excellent presentations — with the one caveat that the Irish love of slagging needed to be kept to a light roast rather than a full roast. "It's like wingmaning at a bar, you're trying to make sure your friend has a good connection. You're not going to embarrass them, you're going to hype them up."5
This is an event designed around what Irish social culture is good at. It requires wit, warmth, performance, and the ability to advocate for someone you love in a room full of strangers. It rewards exactly the qualities that a Hinge text exchange is worst at surfacing and that an Irish pub conversation is best at producing.
It sold out. This is not a coincidence.
The Venues Now Running
MyCheekyDate has hosted over 800 speed dating events in Dublin — and is currently running regular events at BrewDog Dublin, with the June 2026 Saturday Night events selling quickly.6 The BrewDog venue is significant: it's a pub. Not a hotel function room. Not a corporate event space. A pub. Speed dating in a pub in Dublin is the closest possible thing to how Irish people have always met each other.
Your Friend My Friend — speed dating at the Marlin Hotel near St Stephen's Green — has events selling out within two days, with a strict zero-tolerance policy for poor etiquette and a no-ghosting rule that extends to the event itself.7 Previous attendees: "The atmosphere was warm and inviting. The matchmaking process and communication afterwards was exceptional and very quick — less than 24 hours."7
SpeedDublin Dating runs events across Temple Bar, Docklands, and Portobello — three of Dublin's most distinct social zones. Portobello in particular — the neighbourhood around the Grand Canal, home to independent cafés, wine bars, and a creative professional community — has become one of the city's most active social areas for young professionals who are tired of the apps.8
2Connect.ie — Irish registered, running for over 17 years — has run more than 1,800 events across Dublin, Cork and Galway, with 32,000 attendees and 125,000 dating matches produced.9 They run speed dating, dinner dating, pub quizzes, and singles mixer parties. Their pitch is direct: "I urge you to get offline and meet people in the real world."9
Table for 2. The Dublin Ages 35-45 event that Eventbrite describes as "OMG ANOTHER SOLD OUT EVENT" — which is either the most Irish event description possible or the most honest one.10
The Housing Crisis Broke The Back End
Here is the part that makes Dublin's app failure a different kind of story from Miami or Seattle or Singapore.
The apps didn't just fail to produce good conversations in Ireland. They produced conversations that led to dates that had nowhere to go.
61.7% of Irish adults aged 18 to 34 still live with their parents — the seventh-highest rate in the EU.11 Dublin rents average over €2,000 per month.11 The average age at which an Irish person leaves the family home is 27.9 years — compared to 22 in Sweden.11
The app optimised the top of the funnel. The housing crisis broke the bottom of it.
You match. The conversation builds — slowly, because Irish people are terrible on the apps and building the conversation takes work. You arrange a date. The date goes well. And then two people who have been building toward this moment discover that neither of them has a flat they can invite the other person to, that hotels are €100 minimum, and that the end of a genuinely good evening involves standing in the rain outside a pub in Rathmines while both people try to work out what comes next.
The app was never going to solve this. The in-person events don't solve it either. But the in-person event at least produces the connection in a context where both people are present and warm and real — rather than in a chat window that has already required three times the effort to get to the same point.
The Research Confirming the Shift
The Irish Times' 2025 piece on app alternatives cited a study from Arizona State University that puts a number on something Irish people have known anecdotally: "Relationships that began on dating apps scored slightly lower in long-term satisfaction compared with those that started in person. It wasn't a massive drop, but it was statistically significant."12
The researcher's theory: "If you're used to thinking there's always someone else around the corner, you're less likely to invest deeply."12
This is the app mindset, named. The Irish people who are showing up at Conscious Connections, at Pitch A Friend at Foley's, at SpeedDublin in Portobello, at the Your Friend My Friend event at the Marlin — have made a different choice. They have decided to invest in the person in front of them rather than managing a queue. To be in the room rather than in the chat window. To trust the Irish gift of the gab, in person, over three minutes or five or however long it takes.
Ireland also has, in its back pocket, a counterargument to the entire app era that predates the internet by several centuries: the Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival, running all September in County Clare, drawing 60,000 visitors from across Ireland and the world.13 A month of craic, dancing, pub-hopping, and matchmaking that has been producing connections since the 1800s. The festival has survived the arrival of the internet, the smartphone, and now the specific humiliation of the app era.
It is still running. It is still drawing 60,000 people. The apps had twelve years. Lisdoonvarna has been at this considerably longer.
What The Room Does Here That The App Cannot
The Irish Times piece on the new dating scene made the argument simply: the events that are working are the ones "aiming to dilute some of the cynicism, fatigue and time-wasting nature of the apps."5
The dilution happens specifically in person. In a room where the conversation has to be carried without the protection of the delete key. Where the warmth is not constructed across twelve drafts of a text. Where the person shotgunning a beer in front of the crowd is making a choice — to be seen, to be specific, to be a person in a room rather than a profile on a screen.
78% of dating app users report burnout from the cycle of swiping, matching, and being ghosted.14 Two-thirds of current app users say they want to meet people in person instead.15 In Dublin — where the culture has always run better in person, where the apps were always a slightly bad fit, where the gift of the gab has always been the actual asset — those numbers are an understatement.
The Irish Times called it in the headline. The room at Foley's confirmed it.
At Luvo, we've always known that craic can't be generated in a chat window. It has to happen in the room. We make the introduction. You bring the gift of the gab — the real version, not the one that took forty-five minutes to type.
Sources:
Footnotes
Irish Times, "Online Dating Fatigue: 'Irish People Are Terrible on the Apps,'" February 2025 (podcast and feature) ↩
Business of Apps, "Annual Dating App Market Revenues Decline for First Time," April 2026 ↩ ↩2
Global Dating Insights, "UK Singles Increasingly Focus on Purposeful Matchups," December 2025, citing Lovehoney "Twenty Twenty Sex" report ↩
Vocal Media / Confessions, "10 Best Dating Sites and Apps in Ireland for 2025," citing Statista 2024 and CSO 2024 data ↩
Irish Times, "Ireland's New Dating Scene: Finding Love the Old-Fashioned Way," November 16, 2024 — featuring Pitch A Friend, Conscious Connections, Tracy (33), and 2Connect.ie ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
MyCheekyDate Dublin, mycheekydate.com/speed-dating-dublin, June 2026 ↩
Your Friend My Friend, tickettailor.com/events/yourfriendmyfriend, citing event listings and attendee testimonials ↩ ↩2
SpeedDublin Dating, speeddublindating.com ↩
Eventbrite Dublin speed dating listings, 2025–2026 ↩
Irish Times / Eurostat 2025 data, "Is the Number of Young Irish Adults Still Living in Their Family Home on the Decline?" May 2026; MyHome.ie data on Dublin rents, 2026 ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Irish Times, "As Dating Apps Lose Their Appeal, the Race Is On to Create Real-World Experiences," August 23, 2025, citing ASU research by Professor Sharabi ↩ ↩2
Fodors, "I Was Sick of Dating Apps, So I Tried Ireland's Wild 60,000-Person Matchmaking Festival," November 2025 ↩
Forbes Health / OnePoll survey, 2024 ↩
Elevated Magazines, "Why Dating Apps Are Losing Users in 2025," August 2025 ↩