It’s the end for Dingle’s ballroom of romance as former Kerry Hillgrove nightclub turns into laundry

The Hillgrove Hotel ballroom that was once the throbbing heart Dingle’s nightlife will soon dance to a different tune when it is redeveloped as a laundry serving the hospitality industry throughout Kerry.

The laundry development, which received planning permission on January 20, will involve a €500,000 expansion of the existing laundry facility that was established in the Hillgrove in recent years to serve the needs of the hotel and five additional guesthouses owned by Dingle Hospitality Ltd.

The expanded laundry will create up to 20 new jobs in Dingle and will provide a service for the hospitality industry throughout Kerry, focusing in particular on smaller hotels in Tralee and Killarney.

Director of Dingle Hospitality Ltd Kieran Ashe told The Kerryman he initially considered setting up the expanded laundry in a new premises but ultimately decided that “it made more sense to redevelop the Hillgrove ballroom”.

“The laundry is bursting to expand and the nightclub had too much uncertainty attached… From Dingle we’ll be able to service hotels in Tralee and Killarney, potentially employing another 20 people,” said Kieran. He hopes to have the new laundry up and running in time for the coming summer season but “that depends on how long it takes to get machinery and get the work done”.

The decision to close down the nightclub permanently didn’t come easy for the Ashe family who bought the Hillgrove from fellow Annascaul man Tommy McCarthy in 2007 and worked hard to make it a success. However, a combination of factors meant they were fighting a losing battle from the start.

Within a year they were hit by the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy and in the recession that followed the young tradesmen from West Kerry and around the county, who had been loyal to the cause of drinking and dancing, bailed out of Ireland to seek work abroad. But, even without the devastating impact of the recession, legal and cultural changes had started an insidious undermining of the nightclub scene.

New laws drawn up around then via Justice Minister Michael McDowell’s vision of a café society meant pubs could open later and operate as dance venues, and this put them into direct competition with nightclubs. Pubs had an immediate advantage in the contest: they were in the centre of town while nightclubs and traditional hotel ballrooms tended to be further out on the edges of towns. The dancing and drinking public took the easy option and the ballroom business nationwide nosedived.

Cultural changes took a toll as well. “In the ‘90s and early 2000s the easiest way for boy to meet girl was in a nightclub, now they’ve already met online before they come out to meet in-person in a pub,” said Kieran, adding: “There’s a worldwide trend in nightclubs closing, it’s not even local or national”.

Despite the challenges, the Ashes kept the nightclub going and hosted some memorable events such as concerts by Snow Patrol and The Coronas, Walking on Cars played their first big gigs in the Hillgrove and there were comedy nights with the likes of Pat Shortt and Tommy Tiernan and any number of other offerings, ranging from Other Voices concerts to local charity events.

They enjoyed busy bank holiday weekends and played host to coachloads of visiting young revellers for a time, but while this promised a lifeline it didn’t go down well locally and was abandoned. “The big nights were too big for Dingle and the small nights were too small to be economically viable,” said Kieran.

With no solution to this dilemma in sight, the Ashes closed the nightclub in 2019 and, with a few rare exceptions, it has remained closed since then. The planned laundry development will now consign the ballroom to history but Kieran still holds out the hope that it might be possible to include a ‘social space’ in some future development of the hotel side of the Hillgrove.