DJs and dancers rally to save Dublin music venue after hotel's injunction

By Bairbre Holmes, Press Association

The row over sound levels at a central Dublin venue is “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for Irish nightlife, the organiser of a protest has said.

Live DJs played as hundreds of people danced on Exchequer Street to show their opposition to legal action taken against Yamamori Izakaya, a Japanese restaurant that holds music events.

Its neighbour, the Hoxton Hotel, claims it has been forced to close around a quarter of its rooms because of “numerous guest complaints about late-night, low-frequency music noise and vibration”.

Last week, the leaseholder, Trinity Hospitality, sought a court injunction “to reduce excessive noise transfer from Yamamori Izakaya into the hotel”.

Protest organiser Blew, a local DJ, said the city has lost several late-night venues to “hotel chains or apartment buildings” and that social and cultural spaces have been “squashed”.

She said she is not affiliated with the venue but organised the protest because it is one of two venues left “where you can find good music five nights a week, that supports local DJs, where it’s free entry”.

Blew added: “It’s really important because they keep a lot of local DJs in business, keep them going.”

Addressing the crowd on Tuesday night, musician Abdullah Al Bayyari said it was “a perfect chance to highlight that we deserve better”, and called on the Government to start “investing in our culture and investing in what matters to us”.

There has also been a “rapid” fall in late-night venues across the country from “thousands to hundreds”.

Dr Al Bayyari added that the need to “facilitate large corporations and international companies” was once “understandable”, but now the economy is strong, it is time to “shift focus” and “start pouring investments into the Irish people, Irish businesses, Irish culture, Irish language and history.”

In a statement, Trinity Hospitality said it was “not seeking to close the Yamamori Izakaya restaurant or nightclub” and “the ultimate goal is to advance a testing and resolution process that will enable a collaborative solution”.

The leaseholder said it understands the restaurant has long hosted its “Izakaya Basement” late-night events, but when the hotel closed for refurbishment “DJ events started in the ground-floor restaurant five days per week, which lacks the appropriate structural-acoustic measures for nightclub events”.

In an Instagram post on Tuesday evening, the restaurant said it had commissioned an “expert” sound report when the hotel was being refurbished in 2023 to “assist them in installing necessary sound attenuation measures”, and that “the sound levels recorded are considerably lower than typical late-night venues”.

They say when the hotel raised the problem shortly after it reopened in November 2025, “we immediately agreed to meet to discuss the issue and requested information about the sound attenuation measures that were installed” but only received that information on Tuesday morning.

Trinity Hospitality says it felt it “had no choice but to submit the application as we were concerned the matter was not progressing quickly enough”.

It said the “very detailed structural information” Yamamori Izakaya had requested “should not have prevented collaborative discussions or joint testing”.

Joint testing was carried out over the weekend, which the hotel says will be analysed by “acoustic specialists”.

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