Limerick’s Acoustic Club - something halfway between a cabaret and a confessional booth

ON a biting Tuesday evening in Limerick, when the city’s Georgian terraces seemed to shrug against the cold, I ducked into the Number Three Bar on Glentworth Street. Inside, the welcome was warmer. It was open-mic night at The Acoustic Club - a weekly gathering that has quietly grown into one of the most democratic stages in the city.
Every Tuesday from 9pm this modest space transforms into something halfway between a cabaret and a confessional booth. The crowd is a mixture: some attentive, leaning forward as if the lyrics might slip through the cracks if they didn’t listen closely; others talking over the music, pint glasses clinking, oblivious. That, perhaps, is the charm of open mics: the attention of the room is never guaranteed - it must be won.

READ MORE: Georgian gem awaits revival in the heart of Limerick city centre

The Curator and the Chronicler
Dominic Taylor, poet, songwriter, and the club’s tireless organiser, opened the evening. With fellow musician Fergal Nash providing guitar support, he launched into Conspiracy - a sharp-edged catalogue of the myths and suspicions that continue to swirl around events like the 1969 moon landing. It was part social satire, part late-night paranoia diary. For a moment, I found myself thinking of Café Wha? in New York - Greenwich Village’s legendary haunt where Dylan and Hendrix and poet Allen Ginsberg cut their teeth. Limerick may be smaller, but the instinct is the same: give voices a room, and see what sparks.

Dominic Taylor
Taylor isn’t simply the night’s host. He’s also its historian. The Acoustic Club began in 2014, during Limerick’s City of Culture celebrations, when it was known as The Acoustic Café. From café corners in the Milk Market to residencies in The White House and Charlie Malones, to the Record Room of the Commercial Bar, the club has always found new stages.
Since 2024, it has been rooted at the Number Three. Along the way, it has birthed compilation albums, supported charities, and hosted heavyweight names like John Spillane, Denis Allen, Mick Hanly, and Don Mescall.
But the heart of the project is not the guest stars. It is the weekly opportunity for new voices to be heard. Taylor, alongside volunteers like Eugene Nolan (producer of the club’s compilation CDs) and Keith Harris (who records and uploads every show), ensures that each songwriter not only has a chance to play but also to document their own progress. In a scene where many early gigs disappear into the ether, The Acoustic Club functions as both a stage and an archive.

Singer songwriter Nash
After Taylor, the spotlight shifted to Nash himself. Known in Limerick as a busker with a knack for accessible songwriting, Nash has released an album available on Spotify. On this night, he sang of Curraghchase - the wooded estate west of the city that was once home to poet Aubrey de Vere. Nash’s performance was both grounded and spacious, like a song shaped by air and trees. It carried with it the lilt of someone used to singing to strangers on the street, coaxing them into pausing mid-stride.

Winning the Room
Then came Fergus Moloney, who strode up with a left-handed guitar slung across his body and a harmonica around his neck. If the earlier performers had to fight for the room’s attention, Moloney simply took it. His playing was deft, his voice strong, his presence quietly magnetic.
He introduced a song titled Sarajevo, written in memory of Julie, a nurse from Devon killed during the Bosnian-Serbian war of the 1990s. The lyrics carried the weight of witness; the melody, restrained and haunting, demanded silence. It was one of those rare open-mic moments when the chatter evaporates, and the room becomes a single ear.
His second offering, Bandstand, was a love song with both muscle and tenderness, proof that his storytelling wasn’t confined to history’s tragedies.
Moloney’s set reminded everyone of the stakes of songwriting: it is not always entertainment, but testimony. The Acoustic Club, with its anything-goes policy, makes room for that.

READ MORE: Limerick city emerging as Ireland's rising capital of culture

Poetry Meets Melody
If Moloney had stilled the room, Dublin-born songwriter Ruth Egan brought a different kind of vulnerability. She introduced a piece inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Spring and Fall: To a Young Child. Hopkins’ meditation on innocence, grief, and the inevitability of mortality is not obvious material for a song, yet Egan leaned into its rhythms.
Her voice lacked polish, but the sentiment was genuine. In truth, one imagined the piece soaring higher in the hands of a stronger vocalist - but her willingness to translate Hopkins into melody was itself a small act of daring. Too often, open mics are weighed down by cover versions of well-worn classics. Egan’s decision to work from Hopkins suggested a different ambition: that a songwriter’s palette might include literature as well as life.

The Shape of the Club
This, in essence, is The Acoustic Club: a forum where polished acts and tentative experiments share the same bill. Newcomers are invited to play up to three songs or 15 minutes, and the door is open to all genres. The club has produced five compilation CDs and even run workshops with heavyweight songwriters like Spillane and Don Mescall. But the ethos remains disarmingly simple: equal time, equal opportunity, and no velvet ropes.
Open mics, by nature, are equal parts rehearsal room and public performance. They allow seasoned musicians to road-test new material, and they give first-timers a stage that isn’t hostile. What sets The Acoustic Club apart is its archival instinct - its determination not just to provide a platform but to document, to give fledgling songwriters footage of their own work, a mirror to grow against.
And yet, despite its longevity and reputation, one challenge remains: representation. Female voices are rare here. Taylor and his team are actively calling for more women singer-songwriters to take part. The audience, largely supportive, would surely benefit from a wider spectrum of perspective and sound.

Between Cabaret and Communion
What struck me most in the hour I stayed - from 9pm to 10pm - was the predominance of original songs. In many open mics, covers dominate, but here the four performers shared material of their own making. For that alone, kudos! It transforms the night from casual entertainment into something closer to a songwriters’ laboratory.
But the experience isn’t seamless. At times, the atmosphere veers towards cabaret, with talkers in the corner unbothered by the lyrics unfolding before them. At other moments, the silence is reverent, like a church stripped of its doctrine but not its devotion. The push and pull between distraction and attention is what makes the night feel alive.

The Wider Context
Limerick has long carried the weight of being Ireland’s third city, often overshadowed by Dublin’s industry and Cork’s bohemian sheen. Yet beneath the headlines, the city has nurtured artists who are fiercely independent. The Cranberries may be its most famous export but a whole generation of songwriters, poets and performers has cut their teeth in smaller venues like this one.
Spaces such as The Acoustic Club matter because they resist homogenisation. In an age when musicians upload their songs into the endless churn of Spotify playlists, the club insists on presence: a body in a room, a voice in the air, an audience that may or may not care but is there. The stakes are higher because the feedback is instant, and the connection - when it happens - is electric.

Looking Ahead
Taylor and his team are determined to keep pushing the club forward. Beyond the weekly sessions, they have collaborated on charity CDs, brought in national figures to share their craft, and maintained a strong ethos of community. Yet their appeal for more female songwriters is telling. For the scene to thrive, it must be as diverse as the city itself.
The Acoustic Club is also positioning itself as a bridge. For the emerging songwriter, it is the first step out of the bedroom. For the established musician, it is a chance to trial new work before risking it on a paying audience. For the casual listener, it is a reminder that songs are not manufactured artifacts but living, changing entities.

Limerick – A Cultural Hub
In a city still fighting for recognition as a cultural hub, spaces like The Acoustic Club are vital. They offer what streaming platforms cannot: presence, risk, the electricity of the unedited moment. They remind us that music isn’t just a product but a process, and that the distance between a songwriter’s bedroom and a stage needn’t be a chasm.
The Acoustic Club is not glamorous. The Number Three is not Madison Square Garden. But when Moloney’s Sarajevo hushed the bar into stillness, or when Taylor’s Conspiracy drew wry smiles, or when Ruth Egan risked reshaping Hopkins’ grief into melody, the scale didn’t matter.
What mattered was the room, the song, and the fragile bridge between them.
On that cold Tuesday, Limerick sounded like itself - creative, resilient and bursting with fledgling talent.