About The Ozone

The Ozone is an independent news and information site for Leixlip, Celbridge, Maynooth and the rest of North Kildare, published by The Ozone. It is free to read. It is not affiliated with Kildare County Council, any Government body, any broadcaster or any newspaper.

Why “The Ozone”?

The Ozone was a nightclub behind the Rye Vale Tavern on Pound Street in Leixlip, near the gates of Leixlip Castle, with the river across the street (planning record). It ran through most of the 2000s, was renamed Zinc in 2009 and closed completely in 2012, as the Daily Edge recalled in 2015. The site was redeveloped, and an Aldi opened there in June 2018 (Shelflife, 2018).

Two of the Daily Edge’s “18 memories of the Ozone everyone who was ever there will recognise”, by Nicola Byrne:

• Refusing to call it Zinc. NO. It’s the Ozone.
• The rumours it was becoming an Aldi would just NOT END.

We borrowed the name for a news site about the same streets. The town’s own name is older: Leixlip comes from the Old Norse lax hlaup, “salmon leap”, after the falls on the Liffey, and its Irish name, Léim an Bhradáin, means the same (logainm.ie, the Placenames Database of Ireland).

How the newsroom works

The Ozone’s stories are written by AI. Several times a day our software reads local news outlets that allow it, public bodies such as Kildare County Council, An Garda Síochána and Uisce Éireann, and open data such as Met Éireann forecasts, Irish Rail’s live train times and the Property Price Register. An AI editor picks what is local and newsworthy, an AI writer drafts an original report in our own words, and a separate AI review checks the draft against its sources and our legal rules.

A plain word check in our code then holds back anything legally sensitive (sexual offences, children in court, family law, live trials, inquests and suicide) for the publisher to read before it can go out. Everything else is published without a person reading it first. That is why every story is labelled AI-generated and lists the reporting and public records it was built from, so you can check our work, and why a person reads every correction request. Read our editorial policy, our community guidelinesand our privacy notice.

What you’ll find here

• Live trains. Departures from Leixlip Confey, Louisa Bridge, Maynooth and Hazelhatch from Iarnród Éireann’s live feed. Always check with the operator before you travel.
• We read the records. Council news and notices, planning applications and home sales on the Property Price Register, summarised in plain English.
• Weather, roads, power and water. Met Éireann forecasts and warnings, road closures, power cuts and water outages across North Kildare in one place.
• We show our sources. Every story links to what it was built from. Every number on the site comes from a named source with its date, and when a source is down we say so rather than guess.

For website owners: OzoneBot

Our software identifies itself as OzoneBot, with a link to this page. It reads robots.txt before every request and follows it, including any rules for Anthropic’s crawlers (ClaudeBot,anthropic-ai and the like), because our stories are written with Anthropic’s Claude. It waits as long as your Crawl-delay asks, takes a refusal as final and never tries to get past a firewall or a challenge page. To stop it reading your site, add User-agent: OzoneBot and Disallow: / to your robots.txt, or tell us.

Contact and corrections

For corrections, complaints, news tips and advertising, use our contact form and we’ll reply by email. Read how we handle corrections and complaints.

Ownership and advertising

Adverts are always labelled as advertisements and kept separate from our reporting, and advertisers have no say over what we report. When a story involves The Ozone or a business it owns, the story says so.Advertise with us.

Publisher

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The Ozone

Email

hello@theozone.ieNot active yet. Please use the contact form.

Contact form

Write to us

To be completed before launch: the publisher’s full name and geographic address and, if the publisher is a company, its company number and registered office (and VAT number, if it has one). Irish law requires them here.