Berlin 64%, Belfast 13%: The Late-Night Venue Gap in 9 European Cities

We built google-maps-email-extractor to pull structured business records, including opening hours, from public Google Maps listings. To stress-test the widely repeated claim that Belfast closes earlier than its European peers, we ran it across nine cities, nightclubs, bars, and live-music venues, on weekend close-times captured in May 2026. The headline finding is that 64% of Berlin venues operate past 2 AM on a weekend night, compared with 13% in Belfast and 9% in Derry/Londonderry. That is the data this post documents.

The problem: Every few months a Northern Ireland paper runs a "Belfast nightlife is dying" or "we need to be more like Berlin" feature, usually anchored to a couple of operator interviews and a Berlin photo. The night-time economy lobby cites the same comparison; the Department for Communities replies with a generic licensing-review timeline; nothing changes. Nobody seems to actually measure it. The result is a debate where everybody has a strong view and nobody has a number. This post fills that gap by counting, venue by venue, what time bars, clubs, and live-music venues in nine European cities are listed as closing on a Friday or Saturday night. The headline contrast is real, but the more interesting finding is the Dublin paradox: Ireland extended club licensing to 6 AM in 2024, and the data shows almost no venues actually using it.

This post is a documentary audit of advertised weekend close-times for nightlife venues across nine European cities. Every percentage below is derivable from the raw Google Maps listing data captured in May 2026, and the underlying per-city datasets sit alongside this post in the project repository. The data is real, the late-night gap is real, and the "Belfast is just lazy, fix the licensing law and a Berlin scene will appear" framing the comparison usually invites is, on this evidence, wrong.

What is night-time-economy licensing? Night-time-economy licensing is the body of statutory rules and local-authority discretion that governs how late on-licensed and entertainment venues can legally operate. In Northern Ireland it sits under the Licensing (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 as amended by the Licensing and Registration of Clubs (Amendment) Act (NI) 2021. In England and Wales it runs under the Licensing Act 2003. In Germany, Berlin imposes no statutory closing time on bars or clubs at all.

Why it matters: Closing time is not just a hospitality detail; it shapes a city's cultural output, its tourism mix, its hospitality labour market, and its competitiveness against peer cities for events and festivals. The advocacy charity Free The Night (NIC109787) is currently lobbying the NI Assembly to reform entertainment licensing on exactly these grounds, and trade associations like the Night Time Industries Association make the same case for the wider UK market.

Use it when: sourcing a quantified peer-city comparison for a feature on Belfast or Derry nightlife, briefing a council or assembly committee on the practical effect of an entertainment-licensing cap, benchmarking a city's late-night offering against European norms, or sanity-checking an anecdotal "we close earlier than Berlin" claim before publishing it.

Key findings

• 64% of Berlin nightlife venues operate past 2 AM on a weekend night, compared with 13% in Belfast and 9% in Derry/Londonderry. That is a roughly 5x gap between the most permissive city in the sample and the two NI cities.
• 36 of 84 Belfast weekend close-times in the sample sit at exactly 1 AM, the standard NI on-licence cap. That density of identical close times is the fingerprint of a regulatory cap, not consumer preference.
• Just six named Belfast venues in the audit operate past 2 AM, and only two operate past 3 AM (Kremlin and Thompsons Garage at 3 AM, plus Liquid Belfast at 4 AM). In Derry/Londonderry, no venue in the audit closes later than 2 AM at all.
• Dublin's 2024 licensing reform has not yet shown up in the data. Ireland extended club licensing to 6 AM in 2024, but 0% of Dublin venues in this sample close past 3 AM, and the dominant late cluster sits at exactly 2:30 AM. Reform on paper, behavioural lag in practice.
• Berlin, Brussels, and Amsterdam are the unconstrained baseline. All three sit above 60% of venues open past midnight and 31% or more past 4 AM. Manchester surprisingly fits this group at 20% past 4 AM; Glasgow is more constrained than Belfast at 2% past 2 AM.
• 497 weekend close-time data points across 505 unique venues were captured in May 2026 via three Google Maps queries per city (nightclubs, bars, live-music venues), deduplicated by Google Place ID. Sample size varies from 34 data points in Brussels to 84 in Belfast.

In this article: The 9-city leaderboard · Belfast smoking gun · Derry zero ceiling · Dublin paradox · Berlin baseline · Manchester and Glasgow · Negative space · What coverage gets wrong · Methodology · Caveats · FAQ

The 9-city late-night leaderboard, weekend close-times

Each row counts weekend close-time data points (Friday plus Saturday) for nightclubs, bars, and live-music venues listed on Google Maps in May 2026. A venue open both Friday and Saturday contributes two data points. Percentages are calculated against each city's own data point count.

Source: weekend close-times pulled from public Google Maps listings via the google-maps-email-extractor Apify actor (v2.0.8), three queries per city (nightclubs in <city>, bars in <city>, live music venues in <city>), deduplicated by Google Place ID, captured May 2026.

The "past 2 AM" cut

The 2 AM threshold is the one that maps cleanest to the policy debate, because it sits above the standard 1 AM NI pub-licence cap and below the European norm. On that single cut, the cities split into three tiers with a wide gap between each: an unconstrained European tier (Berlin 64%, Brussels 62%, Amsterdam 46%), a constrained-but-functional UK and Irish tier (Manchester 37%, Dublin 32%, Edinburgh 23%), and a heavily constrained NI plus Glasgow tier (Belfast 13%, Derry 9%, Glasgow 2%). The gap between the bottom of the European tier (Amsterdam 46%) and the top of the NI tier (Belfast 13%) is 33 percentage points, more than 3x.

Story A, Belfast, the 1 AM fingerprint

Belfast's 13% past-2-AM rate is the headline, but the more diagnostic number sits at the 1 AM mark: 36 of the 84 weekend close-times in the Belfast sample, 43% of the city's data points, sit at exactly 1 AM. That density of identical close-times is the textbook fingerprint of a regulatory cap, not consumer preference.

In a free market for closing time, a city's distribution looks like Berlin or Brussels, smeared across midnight to 5 AM with no sharp peaks. A city with a hard statutory cap looks like Belfast: a spike at the cap, a long thin tail of clubs that hold a different licence class, and almost nothing in between. That shape, on its own, is enough to dismiss the "Belfast venues choose to close early because demand isn't there" reading of the data. Demand can't drive 43% of independent operators to all settle on the same minute. The Licensing (NI) Order 1996 standard on-licence terminal hour does. Anyone using the Belfast row of the leaderboard to argue Belfast doesn't want a late-night scene is reading the wrong direction off the chart.

Story B, Derry/Londonderry, the 2 AM ceiling and the named six

Derry/Londonderry posts the second-lowest past-2-AM rate in the sample at 9%, but the more striking number is what comes after: zero venues in the Derry sample close later than 2 AM. Not a single 3 AM venue, not a single 4 AM venue. The three Derry venues operating to the 2 AM ceiling (Argyle Bar, Kaboodle, and O'Loughlin's Irish House) all close at exactly 2 AM.

Belfast's tail above 2 AM is also remarkably thin: six named venues in the audit operate past 2 AM (Liquid Belfast at 4 AM, Kremlin and Thompsons Garage at 3 AM, The Beehive Belfast at 2:30 AM, Margot at 2 AM, and a small number of bars including The Laurel Leaf and Bistro 155 at 2 AM on Saturdays only). Of those, only two trade past 3 AM. For a regional capital of around 345,000 people, that is the entire post-2 AM offering visible on Google Maps. By comparison, the Berlin sample alone returns 51% of its 45 data points trading past 3 AM, which in absolute terms is roughly 23 close-time records past 3 AM for that one city, an order of magnitude more than Belfast and Derry combined.

Story C, the Dublin paradox, reform on paper, behavioural lag in practice

Ireland extended late-night licensing for clubs to 6 AM in 2024, a reform the Northern Ireland nightlife lobby has repeatedly held up as the model NI should follow. The data shows the reform has not yet propagated into Dublin's actual operating hours: 32% of Dublin venues in the sample operate past 2 AM, but 0% close past 3 AM. The dominant late-night cluster in Dublin sits at exactly 2:30 AM.

This is the most important single finding for anyone covering NI licensing reform: changing the law is necessary, but the licensing cap is not the only binding constraint. Door staff costs, taxi availability, late-night transport, insurance premia, neighbour complaints, planning conditions on individual premises, and the simple inertia of customer behaviour around what time a Dublin night ends all interact. Eighteen months after the headline reform, the median Dublin venue still treats 2:30 AM as the practical close. The Belfast scene that would actually emerge from a Dublin-style reform looks less like Berlin and more like Dublin, at least in the first eighteen months. That is a more honest story than the one usually told and the one most likely to survive contact with the data when the next NI licensing review surfaces.

Story D, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, what an unconstrained market looks like

Berlin, Brussels, and Amsterdam show what a market without a statutory closing time produces. All three sit above 60% of weekend data points open past midnight, between 46% and 64% open past 2 AM, and between 31% and 33% open past 4 AM. The distributions are smoothly distributed across the late-night window rather than spiked at a single hour.

Berlin's structural setting is the cleanest comparator: no statutory closing time on bars or clubs, and a long-standing administrative tradition (the Sperrstunde was abolished decades ago for most categories) of letting operators set their own hours. The result, in the data, is a fully populated 2 AM to 5 AM tail. Brussels and Amsterdam sit slightly below Berlin on each cut but follow the same shape, suggesting the policy ceiling is the dominant variable rather than something culture-specific to Berlin clubbing. A city that adopted a Berlin-style licensing regime would, on this evidence, see its distribution flatten out across the late-night window over years not months, conditional on the supporting infrastructure (transport, staffing, planning) being there.

Story E, Manchester runs late, Glasgow runs earlier than Belfast

Two UK results in the dataset push back on the simplest "UK closes early" framing. Manchester sits at 37% past 2 AM and 20% past 4 AM, comfortably ahead of Dublin and within striking distance of the European tier. Glasgow sits at 2% past 2 AM, lower than Belfast and Derry, despite operating under the same broad Scottish licensing regime as Edinburgh, which posts 23%.

The Manchester finding suggests the Licensing Act 2003 framework can produce a meaningful late-night layer when local-authority licensing policy is permissive and the city centre has the supporting infrastructure to absorb the demand. The Glasgow versus Edinburgh gap within Scotland (2% versus 23%) is the more interesting one for the licensing-policy debate. The two cities share a national statutory regime; the gap has to come from local licensing-board policy and the mix of premises licences granted, which is the layer of regulatory discretion that often goes unnoticed in national-level reform debates. If Scotland is showing a 10x gap between two of its own cities under the same act, the assumption that a single NI Assembly bill will uniformly modernise Belfast and Derry overnight is doing a lot of work.

Story F, the negative space, the cities with zero past 3 AM

The single finding journalists usually miss in a leaderboard like this is what didn't appear. Three of the nine cities in this audit return zero venues operating past 3 AM in the May 2026 sample: Dublin, Derry/Londonderry, and Glasgow. A fourth, Edinburgh, returns zero past 4 AM (its 21% past 3 AM is concentrated between 3 AM and 4 AM). Belfast, despite the heavy 1 AM clustering, does carry a 3 AM and 4 AM tail of named clubs.

That negative-space finding cuts against a few comfortable narratives. The first is that Ireland's 2024 reform has already changed Dublin's nightlife, which it visibly hasn't in this sample. The second is that Glasgow is a famous nightlife city, which it is, but on advertised weekend close-times its late-night offering is more constrained than Belfast's. The third is that Edinburgh is the obvious peer for Belfast, which the data complicates: Edinburgh has a meaningfully larger 2 AM and 3 AM layer than Belfast, but no 4 AM venues in the sample, where Belfast has at least one. The cities are at different points on different curves, and treating any of them as a single benchmark hides more than it shows.

Cross-city aggregations

Three groupings make the structure of the data visible. Across the nine cities, the median city's past-2-AM rate is 32% (Dublin), and the mean is 32%. The three European cities (Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam) average 57% past 2 AM. The three British-mainland cities (Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow) average 21%, dragged down sharply by Glasgow. The two NI cities (Belfast and Derry) average 11%. The Dublin row (32%) sits cleanly between the British and European groupings, which is broadly where you would expect a post-reform Irish city eighteen months in to land.

One summary stat captures the whole audit: across 497 weekend close-time data points in nine cities, the share of venues operating past 2 AM ranges from 64% in Berlin to 2% in Glasgow, a 32x gap. Northern Ireland's two cities sit at 13% and 9%, comfortably in the constrained tier, with the 1 AM clustering in Belfast acting as the specific regulatory fingerprint that maps the cap onto the data.

What most coverage gets wrong about Northern Ireland nightlife

Coverage of NI late-night licensing repeats a few framings the data here does not support:

• "Belfast venues just choose to close early; demand isn't there." 36 of 84 Belfast weekend close-times in the sample sit at exactly 1 AM. Independent operators do not coordinate on the same minute. That spike is the regulatory cap showing up in the data, not a market signal.
• "If we just change the law, we'll get a Berlin scene." Dublin changed the law in 2024 and 0% of Dublin venues in the May 2026 sample close past 3 AM. The dominant Dublin late cluster sits at 2:30 AM. A Berlin-style distribution requires more than a licensing amendment, on the evidence of the closest available natural experiment.
• "Edinburgh is the obvious benchmark." Edinburgh sits at 23% past 2 AM, materially better than Belfast, but returns 0% past 4 AM in this sample, where Belfast has at least one 4 AM venue. The cities differ along different axes; picking a single benchmark city flattens a more complicated picture.
• "UK cities all close early." Manchester sits at 37% past 2 AM and 20% past 4 AM, well above Dublin and within reach of Amsterdam. The Licensing Act 2003 framework produces a meaningful late-night layer where local-authority policy permits it.
• "Glasgow is a famous nightlife city, so the Scottish regime works." On weekend close-times, Glasgow returns 2% past 2 AM in this sample, lower than Belfast. The Glasgow versus Edinburgh gap inside Scotland (2% versus 23%) shows that local-board discretion matters as much as the national act.
• "Reforming the licence cap is the whole job." It's the necessary first step but not sufficient. Late-night transport, door-staff cost, insurance, planning conditions on individual premises, and customer-behaviour inertia all bind in parallel. The Dublin row of the leaderboard is the cleanest evidence of this in the dataset.

Methodology

• Tool: google-maps-email-extractor Apify actor (v2.0.8), which reads public Google Maps business listings and returns structured records including the weekly opening-hours schedule field (dayHours: [{day, open, close, isClosed, raw}]).
• Sample queried: nine cities, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh, Belfast, Derry/Londonderry, Glasgow. Three queries per city: nightclubs in <city>, bars in <city>, live music venues in <city>.
• Derry/Londonderry handling: queried under both names (Derry and Londonderry), deduplicated by Google Place ID so a venue returned under both queries counts once.
• Date captured: May 2026, single capture window per city.
• Field used: dayHours entries for Friday and Saturday only. A venue open on both nights contributes two data points; a venue open on only one of the two nights contributes one. Venues with no Google Maps hours data (a meaningful fraction in every city) were excluded.
• Threshold definitions: "past midnight" counts close-times of 12:30 AM or later. "Past 2 AM" counts 2:00 AM or later. "Past 3 AM" counts 3:00 AM or later. "Past 4 AM" counts 4:00 AM or later. A venue that closes at exactly 2:00 AM is counted in "past 2 AM" but not "past 3 AM".
• Total data points captured: 497 weekend close-time records across 505 unique venues in nine cities. Per-city data point counts: Berlin 45, Brussels 34, Amsterdam 52, Manchester 59, Dublin 50, Edinburgh 53, Belfast 84, Derry/Londonderry 66, Glasgow 54.
• Aggregation rule: percentages are calculated against each city's own data point count, not against a pooled cross-city denominator. A 13% past-2-AM figure for Belfast means 13% of Belfast's 84 weekend close-time records, not 13% of all 497 cross-city records.
• Sample-size disclosure: sample size varies roughly 2.5x between the smallest (Brussels, 34) and largest (Belfast, 84) cities. Threshold percentages on cities with fewer than 40 data points carry wider sampling intervals; Brussels in particular should be treated as directional rather than precise.
• Known gaps: advertised Google Maps hours may diverge from actual operating hours; in Northern Ireland specifically, the audit captures advertised hours, which coincide with licensed hours because the regulatory cap is hard, but some 1 AM Belfast venues may trade later under occasional Additional Hours Orders that are not reflected in their Google Maps listings. The audit does not quantify economic impact.
• Cross-reference: the directional rank order (Berlin and Amsterdam high, Belfast and Glasgow low) is consistent with the Night Time Industries Association sector reporting and with the Free The Night (NIC109787) campaign's anecdotal European comparisons; this audit converts that anecdote into a measured comparison.

Caveats and what this data does not say

• Advertised hours, not actual hours. Google Maps listings reflect the hours operators choose to publish. A venue's true close time on a given night may differ; in some cities (especially Berlin) listed hours conservatively understate actual close times.
• Sample is venues listed on Google Maps with weekend hours data populated, not the full venue universe. Venues without hours data on Google Maps were excluded, which biases the sample toward established and tourist-facing venues and away from informal spaces and pop-ups.
• Sample size varies materially across cities. Brussels (34 data points) is the smallest sample; Belfast (84) is the largest. Percentages on the smaller cities should be read as directional. The rank order is robust; the precise gap between adjacent middle-tier cities is not.
• Three queries per city is a slice, not a census. "Nightclubs", "bars", and "live music venues in <city>" return Google's algorithmic ranking of those queries, not an exhaustive directory. A different query set (for example adding "late night bars") would return overlapping but not identical samples.
• Belfast 1 AM venues may trade later under Additional Hours Orders. Some Belfast venues holding standard on-licences obtain occasional time extensions for specific dates. Those extensions are not visible in the regular Google Maps weekly schedule, so the 1 AM Belfast cluster slightly overstates the bindingness of the cap on any given weekend.
• No economic-impact quantification. This audit does not estimate £ tourism lost, hospitality jobs forgone, or night-time GVA impact. Doing so credibly would require pairing this dataset with NISRA tourism spend, Tourism NI overnight-stay data, and NTIA night-time-economy GVA figures, which sit outside the scope of this audit. We flag it as a follow-up.
• Glasgow's low number is not a national-Scottish story. Edinburgh under the same Scottish licensing act sits at 23% past 2 AM. The Glasgow result reflects local licensing-board policy and the city's specific premises-licence mix, not the national act.
• 2024 Irish reform impact is interim. The Dublin "0% past 3 AM" finding is an eighteen-month snapshot. The 2024 General Scheme of the Sale of Alcohol Bill in Ireland will, on the lobby's case, take longer than eighteen months to propagate into operator behaviour; treat Dublin as a "reform interim" data point, not a verdict on the reform.

Press lift-out for journalists

Belfast nightlife runs measurably earlier than its European peers. A 2026 ApifyForge analysis of 497 weekend close-time records across nightclubs, bars, and live-music venues in nine European cities found that 64% of Berlin venues operate past 2 AM, against 13% in Belfast and 9% in Derry/Londonderry. 43% of Belfast's weekend close-times in the sample cluster at exactly 1 AM, the standard NI on-licence cap. Dublin, eighteen months after Ireland's 2024 club-licensing reform, returned zero venues in the sample closing past 3 AM, complicating the "just change the law" reading of the Belfast debate.

Source: google-maps-email-extractor Apify actor (v2.0.8), reading public Google Maps business listings; three queries per city (nightclubs, bars, live music venues), deduplicated by Google Place ID; 497 weekend close-time records across 505 unique venues in nine cities captured May 2026. Directionally consistent with NTIA sector reporting and the Free The Night (NIC109787) campaign's European comparisons.

Embeddable visuals

Chart 1, Ranked share of venues past 2 AM, by city

A horizontal bar chart, one bar per city, sorted descending from Berlin (64%) at the top to Glasgow (2%) at the bottom. Bars labeled with the percentage. Color the top three (Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam) in a warm late-night tone, the middle tier (Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh) in a neutral tone, and the bottom three (Belfast, Derry, Glasgow) in a cool restrained tone to make the three-tier split visually obvious. Annotate Belfast with the inset note "43% of weekend close-times at exactly 1 AM". Source line: ApifyForge analysis of 497 weekend close-time records across nightclubs, bars, and live-music venues in nine European cities, captured May 2026 via the google-maps-email-extractor Apify actor.

Chart 2, The Belfast 1 AM spike

A histogram of Belfast weekend close-times, x-axis 11 PM through 4 AM in 30-minute bins, y-axis count of data points. The 1 AM bin should dominate (36 of 84 data points), with a long thin tail trailing right to 4 AM. Overlay a Berlin histogram in a lighter colour for direct visual comparison, showing Berlin's smoothly distributed 1 AM to 4 AM tail with no equivalent spike. The contrast is the smoking-gun visualisation of regulatory cap versus market distribution. Source line: ApifyForge analysis of weekend close-times for Belfast (n=84) and Berlin (n=45) from public Google Maps listings, captured May 2026.

Chart 3, The Dublin paradox

A side-by-side bar pair, Dublin and Berlin, broken into four threshold buckets (past midnight, past 2 AM, past 3 AM, past 4 AM). Dublin matches or exceeds Berlin at the "past midnight" bucket (80% vs 78%) but drops to zero at the "past 3 AM" and "past 4 AM" buckets where Berlin sits at 51% and 33%. The visual collapse from "past 2 AM" to "past 3 AM" in the Dublin bars makes the eighteen-months-post-reform behavioural lag legible at a glance. Source line: ApifyForge analysis of weekend close-times in Dublin (n=50) and Berlin (n=45) from public Google Maps listings, captured May 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of Belfast nightlife venues operate past 2 AM?

In this nine-city audit captured in May 2026, 13% of Belfast weekend close-time records (11 of 84 data points across nightclubs, bars, and live-music venues) show venues operating past 2 AM. That compares with 64% in Berlin, 62% in Brussels, 46% in Amsterdam, and 32% in Dublin. The named Belfast venues operating past 2 AM include Liquid Belfast (4 AM), Kremlin and Thompsons Garage (3 AM), The Beehive Belfast (2:30 AM), and Margot (2 AM).

Why do so many Belfast venues close at exactly 1 AM?

The 1 AM cluster reflects the standard terminal hour under the Licensing (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 for most on-licensed premises, rather than a market preference. 36 of the 84 Belfast weekend close-time records in this sample, 43% of the city's data points, sit at exactly 1 AM. That density of identical close-times across independent operators is the textbook fingerprint of a regulatory cap. A market without that cap, such as Berlin, produces a distribution smeared smoothly across the 1 AM to 5 AM window with no spike.

How has Dublin's 2024 licensing reform changed nightlife hours?

In this audit, the visible change is partial and stops short of the 3 AM threshold. 32% of Dublin venues in the sample operate past 2 AM, more than Belfast or Glasgow, but 0% close past 3 AM. The dominant Dublin late-night cluster sits at exactly 2:30 AM. The reform has clearly moved Dublin off the standard pre-reform UK or Irish 1 AM cap, but eighteen months in, it has not yet produced Berlin-style late-night density. Treat Dublin as a "reform interim" rather than a verdict.

Is this dataset suitable for a news story about Belfast nightlife?

Yes, with appropriate caveats. The headline contrasts (Berlin 64%, Belfast 13%; the Belfast 1 AM spike at 43% of weekend close-times; Dublin's 0% past 3 AM finding) are robust to the sample-size and snapshot caveats and are the strongest points in the dataset. The precise rank order of adjacent middle-tier cities (Edinburgh versus Dublin, for example) is more sensitive. The press lift-out paragraph above is structured to be copy-paste safe with a clear attribution line.

How does this compare to UK and European trade-body data?

The directional pattern (Berlin and Amsterdam at the top, Belfast and Glasgow at the bottom) is consistent with sector reporting from the Night Time Industries Association and with the Free The Night (NIC109787) campaign's European comparisons. The contribution of this audit is to attach measured percentages to a comparison that is normally made anecdotally, with a transparent methodology and per-city data points.

Where can I download the underlying nightlife data myself?

The dataset was produced by the google-maps-email-extractor Apify actor (v2.0.8) reading public Google Maps business listings. Running it yourself with the three-queries-per-city pattern (nightclubs, bars, live music venues) reproduces a comparable dataset for any city. The actor returns the full weekly schedule per venue, so you can reproduce both the weekend-only analysis above and weekday extensions.

Does this audit account for licence-class variation within Northern Ireland?

It does not split by NI licence class (standard on-licence, registered-club licence, occasional time-extension order). The audit captures the advertised weekly close-time on Google Maps, which for most Belfast pubs equals their standard on-licence terminal hour. A small number of Belfast venues, particularly registered-clubs and the named after-hours clubs at 3 AM and 4 AM, hold different licences that permit later trading. The 1 AM clustering is therefore an on-licence story; the 3 AM and 4 AM tail is a club-licence story.

Ryan Clinton publishes Apify actors and MCP servers as ryanclinton and builds developer tools at ApifyForge. The leaderboard above was produced via the google-maps-email-extractor actor across 27 city-query combinations against public Google Maps listings; the methodology, analysis, and framing are independent of any product positioning. This audit shares the "anecdote-to-measurement" theme with our England waste-carrier register illegal-dumps audit and the cross-jurisdiction comparison method of the SaaS pricing time machine.

Last updated: May 2026