Eddie Mullarkey has spent years running comedy nights in rooms he doesn’t own. Now he’s got Dublin City Council’s blessing to build one, and he’s already sorted out where the try-out gigs go. “It’s going to have two venues,” he told the Irish Times. “The ground floor will be around a 150- to 160-seater and then the basement will be around 60. So we can have new material nights in the basement while the club shows go on upstairs.”

That’s the Craic Den, the Dublin club Mullarkey co-runs with fellow comic Damian Clark. The plan is a purpose-built 200-seat comedy theatre in the former Token arcade bar on Queen Street, Dublin 7. The council granted conditional approval last week for Atlantic Collective, the company behind the club. It can now convert the property near Smithfield into a licensed performance venue. After years of borrowing bar rooms off publicans, Mullarkey and Clark will hold the lease themselves, sound desk included.

Two rooms, and a basement for the jokes that aren’t ready

The split Mullarkey describes is what a purpose-built room buys you. Upstairs, the 150-to-160-seat ground floor takes the ticketed weekend shows. Downstairs, the roughly 60-seat basement is where acts road-test bits that might die. Any comic who’s tried five minutes of untested material in front of a hen party that paid for a headliner knows the appeal of a separate room to die in quietly.

The Irish Times reports the venue is designed to run seven nights a week. There’s a podcast studio built in, space fitted out so comedians can film specials on site, and workshop space where acts can hone their material. That’s a lot of function to hang on one building, and the council attached the usual planning strings. Approval came with restricted hours. The company was also asked to submit details of a “more restrained signage regime” than the plans envisaged before the club begins operations. Nothing says arts venue quite like a planner telling you your sign is too loud before you’ve told a single joke in the place.

Where will the new Craic Den theatre be?

The new Craic Den theatre will be in the former Token arcade bar on Queen Street in Dublin 7, near Smithfield. The building is leased from a Finnish-registered property investment vehicle, Emerald Invest AB, which is to say the freehold on Ireland’s newest grassroots comedy room sits with an investor in Helsinki. Council-imposed opening hours run 6pm to 11pm on weekdays and 5.30pm to midnight at weekends, and Mullarkey told the Irish Times the opening is provisionally set for October after a summer fit-out.

For now the Craic Den still operates out of the Workman’s Club and the adjacent Bison Bar on Wellington Quay, Dublin 2. Founded in 2019, it bills itself as one of Ireland’s busiest clubs, running stand-up seven nights a week and having produced two television comedy series for Virgin Media. They’ve run seven nights a week for years already. The difference at Queen Street is owning the calendar, the bar take, and the sound desk outright.

The sums behind owning the room

Here’s the money math nobody puts in the press release. When you run a night inside someone else’s venue, the venue keeps the bar, sets the hours, and can bump your Saturday for a bigger booking. Owning the lease flips that: the ticket income, the door, the bar spend across seven nights, the podcast rentals, and the filming days all land in the same company’s accounts. It’s a bigger fixed cost and a far bigger risk, which is exactly why most club promoters never take the step.

The timing is either brave or slightly mad, depending on which UK headlines you’ve been reading. In Leicester, the Big Difference venue on the High Street closed in July after landlords took possession over unpaid rent, and accounts filed at Companies House in March for the year to June 2025 showed the Productions company running it was, per Chortle, “£56,000 in the red.” We covered the fallout when a hardship fund opened for Leicester’s unpaid comedians and the festival’s venue went dark, and it’s the cautionary tale sitting behind every new comedy lease signed this year. Mullarkey isn’t blind to it. “It is sad to see some of the arts spaces closing down,” he told the Irish Times.

The wider sector keeps making the same case in public. The Live Comedy Association spent this spring telling fans to email their MPs about a £1bn industry that keeps losing rooms, and the argument that grassroots venues are the pipeline for everything above them has become the standard defence. Building a new one, with a comic holding the lease, is a heavier lift than emailing your MP. It’s also a way to keep the takings inside comedy rather than watching them pile up in a production company’s reserves the way a Frankie Boyle-sized operation can.

A podcast booth and a room to film specials

The unglamorous line in the plans is the one that matters most to jobbing acts: workshop space, a podcast studio, and a room kitted out to shoot specials. Every Irish comic currently paying a London or Dublin production crew to film a set for YouTube or a streamer now has, in theory, a room down the road built for exactly that. A purpose-built comedy room where you can workshop on a Tuesday, gig on a Friday, and record on a Sunday is a rarer thing than the ticket-price coverage suggests, and it’s the reason a one-off festival bill of five acts a night can’t do what a permanent room does for the acts a rung below the headliners.

Mullarkey framed the mission in the plainest terms when he spoke to the Irish Times:

“It’s a space for comedy and talent to grow, which I think the city does really need.”

That’s Eddie Mullarkey, co-owner of Atlantic Collective and resident MC of the Craic Den, talking to reporter about a room that doesn’t exist yet. Whether it opens on time in October, whether the signage gets past the planners, and whether seven nights of programming can carry a full lease are all questions the accounts will answer next summer. For now the only certain figure is the one Mullarkey keeps coming back to: 60 seats in a basement, ready for the material that isn’t funny yet.