Hotel pulls out of hosting child beauty pageant

Organisers of a contentious US-style child beauty pageant have suffered a major blow in their bid to stage their first-ever Irish show, after a hotelier said he was no longer willing to host the event.

Texas-based Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant announced earlier this week via Facebook that a Cork hotel would host the glitzy €20,000 beauty contest in September.

But pageant chiefs admitted yesterday they had been forced to source another venue in Dublin, after the Cork hotelier pulled the plug on the event.