February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Patrick Markey
Forget touring the sites of Angela’s Ashes.
If you’re looking for entertainment in Limerick, talk a stroll down Catherine Street.
According to the Limerick Leader, the city the McCourt brothers made famous for misery will get its first stripper and lap dancing club later this year.
The Voodoo Rooms club will feature girls from the UK and Dublin — five nights a week. And it’s not even illegal.
The paper quotes Garda sources saying that there are no licensing laws covering the flesh-tinted business, as long as the club has a dancing license and liquor license.
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Voodoo Rooms owner, Finbar Griffin, believes the site will become one of Ireland’s only lap dancing clubs.
"From October we will be running the Voodoo Rooms as a lap dancing club," he said.
"The plan is that five nights a week we will have girls in from the UK to perform in Limerick. The club will be run responsibly, with no touching or no propositioning of the girls."
But Limerick lads looking for a little more will be out of luck — The girls are there to work not to party.
"There will be a certain slickness to it and it will very professionally run, not seedy at all. The girls will be in town solely to do their job and will not socialize in Limerick," Griffin warned.
"The girls will come down here and do a couple of nights and it will be like nothing ever seen in Limerick. Every other major European city has lap dancing clubs so Limerick should be no different," he said.
Landlocked
Kerry County has its share of land disputes, but consider the case of an pensioner who has blocked his home’s main entrance and scrambles through a window with his walking stick — all because of a strange battle with his neighbor.
The Irish Examiner reports that Michael Thompson was forced to take up his bizarre behavior after his neighbor issued a solicitor’s missive warning him he will be trespassing if he uses his new door.
The neighbor Elizabeth Forde ordered her solicitor to ask him to block the door because his new porch opens directly onto her land.
Thompson, a 69-year-old pensioner, recently held a protest outside his Lixnaw home, waving a placard and collecting signatures for a petition. But gardaí asked him to stop.
Protesting his innocence, Thompson says his only crime was to rebuild an old porch.
The cement had barely dried when Forde’s letter landed on his mat.
"I have to take medication for a heart condition and climb in and out of my windows. I bought this house to retire and now I can’t get in," Thompson told the paper.
"I want to get on with my neighbor and I want to settle this, but I can’t knock the porch down because my toilet is there," he said.
Forde’s lawyers said the issue should be solved in court.
Shabby Shannon
If you’re passing through Shannon from the airport, you might not want to watch where you step.
At least that’s the concern of the Irish Business Against Litter, which recently presented a survey which found the town to be the dirtiest town in Clare.
The arrival point for thousands of visitors each week, Shannon scored 39 percent, just above half the country average on the litter scale. The lowest rated area in the county, Shannon was followed by popular holiday resort, Kilkee, which scored 50 percent.
The capital of Clare, Ennis scored 62 percent, compared to a county average of 73 percent.
The village of Doolin, which attracts huge numbers of Irish and international visitors, came out highest in the study.
Each area surveyed, including towns, villages and beaches was graded A, B, C or D, depending on the cleanliness of a number of sites around the area.
"It is significant that there were no grade A sites in Shannon, which is an important entrance point to the south-west for visitors arriving through Shannon Airport," said one official.