‘WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO GO TO A NIGHT CLUB WITH 50 PEOPLE INSIDE?’
HAZEL CHU is no stranger to Dublin’s nightlife. The newly elected Lord Mayor of the capital has worked for Diageo, Electric Picnic and the legendary Pod nightclub and is a former club kid herself.
The names of the legendary Dublin clubs where she partied back in the day trip off her tongue — Switch, System, The Kitchen. Staying up dancing until 6am is, she says, “good for the soul”.
She says the post-Covid recovery of the decimated nightlife scene in Dublin is going to be dependent on creating a new nightlife culture that isn’t based around drink.
“I’m not naming names but I think you and I and everyone else can name a few on Harcourt Street [where drink is the focus]. If you look at New York or Berlin, people don’t go out to just go and get drunk.
“I think, before Covid, there were other options coming on stream — for instance, look at Token [in Smithfield], which is a bar but also a restaurant and an arcade, or Virgin Mary [on Capel Street] which is a bar but is non-alcoholic.
“If you look at the spend on Culture Night it’s higher than at any other time of the year for the Dublin economy — because there’s options for people.”
A recent survey commissioned by Dublin City Council revealed that almost three-quarters of Dubliners have a negative view of night life in the Capital. Chu welcomes the promised appointment of a so-called night-time mayor (though she says that ‘czar’ might be a better word, hinting that nobody wants to sound like Dublin’s nightmare), which is part of the programme for government — but she says it will have to be clarified how the post will function.
“Whoever has that position will still work with the council, but, as with the mayor’s office itself, it has to be clarified how it will work — is it ceremonial, is it to guide policy? If a night czar is to fit into local government, we need to look at how the day mayor and night mayor are going to fit together and if they will have the same powers.”
Like many of the sectors that will struggle to recover after the pandemic, clubs were already in trouble. The Wright
Venue in Swords, District 8 at the Tivoli and Lillie’s Bordello, the celebrity go-to off Grafton Street, are just some of the places that have closed in Dublin in recent years.
“I’ve been in nightclubs for 27 years. We’re the forgotten people, we really are,” says Buzz O’Neill-Maxwell, who runs nights at Farrier & Draper off Grafton Street, the Hub in Temple Bar and Opium on Wexford Street.
“A battle that we’ve waged our entire careers has been raised ever more pointedly now — that there is a huge gap between what arts and entertainment are and what politicians consider them to be. More people are entertained by DJs in nightclubs across the country than they are by live music.”
He says that those who work in the sector have disproportionately borne the brunt of the restrictions. “People talk about getting the schoolteachers back to work — but we were the first sector of the entire country to shut down. I had three events around Paddy’s Day all sold out. All that money had to be refunded straight away.”
Both Chu and O’NeillMaxwell agree that the reform of licensing laws, to make it easier to get late licences, will be a key component of recovery. There will also have to be more joined-up representation for those who work in the economic ecosystem of the sector — which includes taxi drivers, food vendors, and bar owners.
But how clubs will actually look post-Covid is still unclear. Chu says that night life may look “a little weird” in the future with social distancing measures in place, and table service is one option that may have to be looked at. O’NeillMaxwell says that social distancing will defeat the purpose of a night club.
“I’ve seen DJs in the last few days where it’s a select event where it’s 50 or a hundred people but I really wonder why anyone would want that.”
‘Night club promoters are the forgotten people...’