The Foresters' hall at the corner of Hill Street and John Mitchel Place has had more lives than most buildings in Newry. It went up in 1907 for the Irish National Foresters, gained a cinema in 1912, ran as the Frontier for decades, turned into a bingo club and was most recently a gym. Last month the Irish News reported that Colin and Caoimhe O'Callaghan, a local husband and wife, intend to restore it. Anyone who wants to understand what happened to a night out in this city could do worse than stand outside it.
The High Street Legacy
Within living memory a night's entertainment in Newry meant a walk into town. The Frontier for a film and, later, a bingo book. A bookmaker's on The Mall on a Saturday afternoon, the results coming through on the radio. In summer, the amusement arcade on the front at Newcastle, with the same machines year after year and a queue for the change kiosk.
The law was written around those buildings. The Betting, Gaming, Lotteries and Amusements (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 licensed the shop, the hall and the arcade as premises, and kept the shops and the bingo clubs shut on Sundays. That rule lasted until the 2022 amendment Act finally allowed Sunday opening, by which point the customers had largely stopped needing them to open at all. The city centre with those venues anchored is now the subject of its own campaign: the Newry People's Forum, newly formed, wants the city pushed up the list of public representatives' priorities, and the empty units around Hill Street are much of the reason.
The Smartphone Shift
The bingo hall lost its customers to a device, and the device kept getting better. Earlier this month O2 switched on its standalone 5G network in Newry, along with Belfast, Derry, Lisburn and Armagh. It was building on a strong base. In Ofcom's most recent report for Northern Ireland, 97 per cent of premises already had outdoor 5G from at least one network and 95 per cent could get full fibre, more than in England, Scotland or Wales.
A game that used to need a cabinet, a floor and a licence for the premises now needs an app store listing and a data plan, and the app has no opening hours. The Quays' owner went into administration in March with more than two dozen units empty; nobody would put that down to phones alone, but the evening trade that once spilled from the halls into the streets around them has plainly thinned.
New Formats for a Different Screen
The phone changed the games as well as the venue. A cabinet in an arcade was built for someone standing in front of it with a handful of coins, and its whole vocabulary, reels, holds, a printed pay table, came from that. A phone is held upright in one hand, often for a minute or two, and the studios that make games for it have designed it for the hand and the minute. The clearest case is crash games, a genre with nothing to feed and nothing to hold. A multiplier climbs on the screen, it stops when it stops, and you either took your number before then or you didn't. It could not have been built for a cabinet, because it depends on a server and on a crowd of other players who are somewhere else.
For a good number of the people who once spent Saturday night at the Frontier, that is where a lot of the evening has gone.
Convenience and Responsibility
The rulebook stayed in the buildings. The 1985 Order predates the internet, and the reform Stormont passed in 2022 was a first phase aimed at premises: Sunday opening, tighter rules on gaming machines, and a power to impose codes of practice. The Department for Communities used that last power to consult, between October and December 2024, on a first code that would ban credit-card payments and cash machines from betting shops and bingo halls.
Online play is not covered at all. The Gambling Commission's remit is Great Britain, although its advertising rules reach across the Irish Sea, and the Assembly's research service reported in January 2025 that a second phase of reform, the one that would deal with remote gambling, will not happen in the current mandate. In the meantime a Newry player is protected by two things: that advertising rule, since a site that cannot be advertised here without a Commission licence brings GB deposit limits, time-outs and identity checks with it, and the tools inside the apps themselves. The local law stops at the shop door, and will for a while yet. The O'Callaghans have a Foresters' hall, a cinema, a bingo club and a gym to work with. The crowd that filled the bingo hall on a Saturday night is not waiting outside for whatever comes next; that part of the evening moved onto the phone a while ago.
