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Belfast Live
Belfast Live
National
Damien Edgar

Free the Night: Group's hopes for changing NI nightlife for the better

Free the Night NI are calling on people who go out in Northern Ireland to have their say on the current nightlife offering available.

The not-for-profit group is surveying revellers and those involved in the night-time economy ahead of a review which should take place in September or October.

They want to get a fuller picture of how people feel about entertainment, alcohol hours, transport and everything else that goes into a night out.

Read more: Why is it still so hard to get a taxi in Belfast?

Boyd Sleator is one of the founders of the group and explains that the survey will feed into research being carried out by the group through QUB PhD candidate Ciara Power, which could feed into that review.

"The response has been amazing so far, we've had over 500 responses in the first day.

"We hope to hit 1,000-1,500 people over the two weeks, so that should give us a good understanding of what people think.

"One thing we're maybe lacking in so far is we haven't had massive response from the likes of taxi drivers, bus drivers and private bus drivers, so it would be good to hear from them."

Belfast in particular has been hit by complaints about the lack of access to transport following nights out, with Covid being blamed for transport shortages.

"After half past 11, public transport goes out the window and taxis are under even more pressure then," Boyd said.

"We have been advocating for the infrastructure to be stronger and for better licensing laws.

"We've also started a transport stakeholder group a few weeks ago - we've got Fonacab and a few venues on board and we're hopeful to get the PSNI and Translink involved too.

"We've met with Belfast City Council and their cultural team and the department at Stormont too and they have talked to us about maybe bringing in this transport stakeholder group too."

Boyd said the review into licensing laws carried out by Stormont politicians last year had still left areas that needed addressing.

"What we felt happened in the last review, was the review agreed to extend the alcohol licensing by an hour and agreed to keep the entertainment open to 3am," he said.

"This is all meant to be based around thinking about the harm of alcohol and increasing tourism.

"Increasing the alcohol times by an hour doesn't really mitigate that though and also, it does nothing to increase people coming into the city centre either.

Free the Night want it made easier for promoters to use venues for one off events as well (Niall Murphy)

"More importantly it doesn't help people from even outside Belfast to get into the city centre.

"We're talking about getting tourists in from Manchester, London and other cities in Europe into Belfast.

"But if you can't people from say Larne into Belfast, then that's a challenge."

The group is hopeful that if they can get a broad enough cross-section of responses to their survey, they can present their findings to the next review and influence NI's nightlife for the better.

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