Dublin’s first “night mayor” finds it “embarrassing” to explain Ireland’s highly restrictive licensing laws to European counterparts.
Ray O’Donoghue, who leads Dublin City Council’s efforts to develop a vibrant night-time economy, said visitors to the capital are “shocked” they cannot go to clubs or bars after 2.30am.
“They can’t get their heads around it,” he said, noting this has an impact on tourism.
“Even the lads in the 24-hour Spar [are] talking about tourists coming into the shop asking: ‘Where do we go now?’”
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“And what can you say? ‘Back to your hotel or your Airbnb, because there’s no regulated place for you to go.’”
A recent report on the State’s nightclub industry and dance culture said the sector is “downsizing”. There are now only 83 regularly active nightclubs in the Republic of Ireland, compared to 522 in 2000, according to the report published by campaign group Give Us the Night.
For more than two decades, Give Us the Night has advocated for improvements to night-time culture in Ireland, including licensing law reform. The group’s fingerprints are on many of the initiatives progressed in recent years, including through the Night-Time Economy Taskforce established by the Department of Culture.
There was the expansion of Culture Night events and activities later into the night, the participation of arts venues in nightlife activity, the appointment of night-time advisers or “night mayors” and noise-mitigation grant schemes.
The industry is regulated by a 90-year-old piece of legislation, the 1935 Public Dance Halls Act. Nightclubs account for 0.6 per cent of the 14,085 active liquor licences across Ireland. Most nightclubs operate six to nine hours a week, paying on average more than €20,000 for special exemption orders annually.
The highest concentration of Ireland’s nightclubs – 23 – is in Dublin. Ireland has the strictest nightclub curfews in Europe, and Dublin has the earliest closing times of any European capital. The average European nightclub closing time is 6.30am. In Dublin, it is 2.30am.
Before the last general election, licensing law reform pursued by former minister for justice Helen McEntee effectively stalled.
Sunil Sharpe, who co-authored the report with Ciara Power, is a techno DJ known for elevated, intense sets, and a capacity to play for hours.
“The business model of a nightclub is particularly difficult,” Sharpe said. “It’s an industry more heavily regulated than anywhere in Europe. We still can’t give young people the basics ... The generalisation made is that if you’re out late at night that must mean you’ve been boozing all evening and you’re going to keep doing that until it’s bright. That is simply just not the case. Drinking culture has changed.”
The data backs this up. Alcohol consumption has fallen by 34.3 per cent since 2001. Today, people in Ireland are drinking alcohol at average European levels, according to a report published last month by the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland.
Dublin is not alone in experiencing a post-pandemic shift towards larger one-off dance music events, with some audiences driven by a desire for experiences and big moments (and the social media cachet of documenting them). SILO at the RDS in Dublin 4 hosts huge parties. In Belfast, AVA Festival pulls a substantial audience from Dublin.
Martin Smyth and Fernando Martin, along with their team at event management company District 8, are a Dublin club culture success story. Their operations include Index, which in February moved to the Academy venue on Middle Abbey Street. District 8 also holds large one-off events and a festival in Kildare.
“I’m not a big memory lane guy, I look forward,” Smyth said. “The event industry or market in Ireland – if that includes what we do – it feels like it’s booming. But I do think a knock-on effect of that is it has become more difficult for mid-tier spaces ... If you’re into dance music, people tend to go for bigger occasions.”
Smyth is in favour of licensing law reform, saying all kinds of nightlife and music scenes could benefit. “I think it could be infrequent, maybe once a month, or maybe for a few key nights a year. The conservative, scary public perception of late night opening hours, it shouldn’t be viewed like that,” he said.
O’Donoghue, the night-time economy adviser, does not have the typical profile of a leader within Dublin City Council, having emerged through the city’s club scene as a DJ and club promoter.
Under his reign there has been a rapid prototyping of ideas. After a brief trial of a welfare zone on College Green to assist partiers at night, the Nee-Naw, a Department of Justice-funded mobile support unit van, launched earlier this month in the Camden Street area.
“We just want to get things up and running. Just give it a go,” he said.
O’Donoghue is also incorporating club culture into mainstream city festivals. “We did late night events at Culture Night, St Patrick’s Festival, St Brigid’s Festival, Culture Date with Dublin 8 ... There is a bubbling underground scene. There may not be a lot of spaces, but they are there. But you do have to go out and find them. They’re not falling into your lap,” he said.
But in recent months, O’Donoghue has noticed a subtle, positive change in the atmosphere in the city centre. “It does feel like there’s a shift and a momentum,” he said. Survey data monitoring safety sentiment that asks: “do you feel safe in Dublin city at night?” was at 24 per cent in December 2022, rising to 31 per cent last summer. The latest available statistic is 37 per cent, he said, adding: “So even in the first six months of the year, it has improved.”
At Tengu, a club at the back of Yamamori restaurant close to Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge, DJ EMA programmes and manages the space, runs the label Woozy, and cofounded the collective Skin&Blister.
“Dublin can feel like it’s vibrant, evolving and inclusive one minute, but then stifling and restrictive the next. It is a really tough place to build a rich scene,” EMA said. EMA cited the cost of special exemption orders as contributing to “wild” overheads, saying touring artists visiting Dublin find the costs, laws and opening times “baffling”.
But EMA sees community at the core of Dublin nightlife, saying Dublin would feel “super flat” without collectives such as Honeypot, Tender, Stretch and Dublin Modular, which “focus on local talent and local community-building and have created incredibly safe and inclusive spaces”.
Last weekend at Dublin Pride, there was an abundance of parties. One of the people behind some of the biggest LGBTQ+ events in the city is Lisa Connell, who runs the club brand Mother with Cormac Cashman. “We had around 7,000 people at the Block Party [at Collins Barracks], and we did four parties on Saturday night with an average of 800 people per party. Honestly, we could have put more on,” Connell said.
Connell pointed to the number of alternative Pride parties that took place as indicating a “really strong” appetite for clubbing. “Along with that, people are flat out running raves, it’s so deadly to see ... There seems to be a renewed curiosity in things. People are really interested in experiences.”
On the potential for expanded opening hours, Connell said: “You’d hope that if you weren’t corralling people into a limited time slot, it would encourage people to pace themselves. I know from a venue perspective, we feel the infrastructure around nightlife isn’t great. If people stay out later, can they get home? In other cities that’s set up very well.”
Among those making things happen, there is an enthusiasm for Dublin’s vibe to become more optimistic. “We probably took one of the biggest batterings during the pandemic,” Smyth said, “Nobody wants to talk about the pandemic, but there’s something about the hangover of that lifting now.”
