Hotel cancels child pageant booking

The Dublin hotel which was due to stage a US-themed child’s beauty pageant this weekend, has cancelled the booking saying the organisers “did not identify the true nature of the event”.

The Universal Royalty event was scheduled to take place at the Bracken Court Hotel in Balbriggan tomorrow with up to 50 “babies, toddlers and teens” expected to participate.

However, in a statement last night, the hotel’s owners said it had cancelled the booking.

“The hotel says the organisers did not identify the true nature of the event they were planning to stage at the hotel, and that an event of this nature is not in keeping with the family ethos of the business,” a spokesman said. “It is understood that the organisers deliberately ‘went to great lengths to keep the venue secret’, and had ‘taken the precaution of booking two reserve venues’ for their event.”

Earlier this month Universal Royalty boss Annette Hill, who is due to appear on the Late Late Show this evening to talk about the event, admitted that sourcing a venue for the €20,000 pageant had proved a headache and that she was turned down by 28 hoteliers across the country. It is likely she will now look to hold it in one of the other two venues which she had pre-arranged.

If it does go ahead, it looks set to be the last competitions for Ireland’s most famous child pageant star at the age of just nine.

Aisling Murphy, from Cork, has told her mother she wants to go out on a high by winning the top award.

She has taken part in more than 20 competitions since the age of six.

Her mother Stephanie has already splashed out more than €10,000 to prepare and enter her daughter for this weekend’s contest alone.

She revealed that among her daughter’s three costume changes will be a show-stopping €2,000 outfit she had especially made to order in the US.

Just last month “Miss Aisling” — who emigrated to Australia a couple of years ago with her family, including father Ger and brother Cian, 5 — landed the top gong at Universal Royalty’s Sydney event.

Last weekend, she was crowned “Grand Supreme” — the second-highest award in child pageant contests — at an event in Southampton in Britain.

But Stephanie said yesterday that Aisling had decided she wanted to devote her time to dancing, singing, and acting from now on — like her hero, 8-year-old Eden Wood, America’s most famous and now “retired” child beauty star.