Back from the brink: Nightclubs open for the first time in 19 months

It’s been 585 days, 83 weeks or 19 months, take your pick, since the Dublin nightclub Lost Lane last opened its doors.

David Morrissey, the proprietor, knows because he has counted them all.

The club off Grafton Street was known until 2019 as Lillie's Bordello to a generation of Dublin clubgoers, along with everybody who was anybody who visited Ireland. Habitually a film or pop star might appear on The Late Late Show later to be found in the "Library" of Lillie's reserved only for those with a "golden key".

It was taken over by the Porterhouse and became Lost Lane in 2019. It traded well for 11 months until March 12th, 2020, when then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar addressed that we were in "uncharted territory".

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The walls of Lost Lane as you ascend the stairs display posters for gigs in the venue that never happened: Martin Harley, Wallis Bird and Joe Chester to name just three.

Lost Lane shut on the evening of March 12th as the limit of 100 people gathering in indoor settings was not viable for a venue that caters for 650 people when full.

“I thought we’d be closed for a couple of weeks and that even would be a stretch. It seems like naivety now. We just didn’t know,” Mr Morrissey said.

“It was horrible, and I’d imagine it was even worse for my wife having to listen to me giving out. Fundamentally it is so draining for everyone associated with the night-time trade.”

Yellow stickers

Lost Lane still has the leather seats from its days as Lillie’s Bordello and still looks like an old-school nightclub, but the familiar yellow stickers ask people to maintain social distancing. There are QR codes on the table for people to order drinks.

Tonight Morrissey, along with the thousands of others involved in the night-time economy, have finally received the guidelines on reopening.

The Vintners’ Federation of Ireland said the rule that events and nightclubs would have to be fully ticketed was “hapless” and would lead to confusion and possibly public order incidents.

There may be confusion around the guidelines, but Mr Morrissey is clear about one thing. Nobody will be getting into Lost Lane without their Covid certificates. “We will be strictly enforcing it. We are calling on the customers to obey the rules and help the staff out.”

Three nights of the first weekend will be devoted to Mother, the Saturday session for the LGBTQ+ community in Dublin. The capacity will be 350 for the first couple of weeks. “We will be watching to see how we manage the queues and the bar.”

Ireland’s nightclubs are opening on a day when almost 2,500 cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in the country. This too is uncharted territory.