Guests at the Lismore Hotel, Co Waterford, don't bother to ask for a morning alarm call before they retire to bed.
That service is provided by Lismore's town clock, in the old courthouse, which was repaired so it could ring in the millennium. Since then, it has just kept on ringing.
Every half-hour its high-pitched tones remind unfortunate guests that they're 30 minutes closer to getting-up time.
Now the hotel's exasperated manager, Mr Jimmy Kelly, has asked Waterford County Council to silence the clock at night before guests call time and take their custom elsewhere.
Many of his regular customers are Dutch and English employees of the Cadena cigar factory in Tallow, who go to bed at 10.30 p.m. and are up at 6.30 a.m. for breakfast. "The first thing they hear are the 11 bells at the top of the hour, followed by another one at 11.30 and 12 more at midnight," Mr Kelly said.
"It's not a dong with a baritone base, either. It's quite high-pitched, bordering on the soprano, in fact."
The sight of bleary-eyed guests complaining at the breakfast table is now a common one.
Mr Kelly succeeded last October in persuading Waterford County Council, which owns the former courthouse of which the clock is a feature, to reset it so the bells worked in the day-time only.
But the clock went on strike, so to speak, and stopped chiming altogether. The townspeople insisted, however, that it be restored for the new year celebrations.
"I had no problem with that," said Mr Kelly. "Even though we had a full house, it was nice to have it ringing at midnight that night."
Mr Kelly says he has grown immune to the noise of the bells, and that's not just because he sleeps in the hotel's only back room. "I have to," he insists. "It's where the alarm control panels are."
The secretary of Waterford County Council, Mr Peter Carey, said the council was seeking advice on how the clock could be adjusted to keep it silent at night. In the meantime, he won't be accepting Mr Kelly's invitation to spend a night in the hotel. "Maybe when it's fixed," he said.
The hotel is one of the oldest in Ireland. Built in 1770 to accommodate the overflow of visitors to the Duke of Devonshire's Lismore Castle, it began trading as a hotel in 1791.
