北爱尔兰卖酒太难，德国超市利德尔干脆在店里开了一家酒吧

What would it be like if there were a pub inside Walmart?

Plenty of worn-out shoppers have wondered: a couple of drinks before Black Friday might help you survive the chaos at the checkout.

Now that dream of a supermarket pub has come true at a Lidl in Northern Ireland, thanks to the region's outdated alcohol laws.

This summer, the German discount chain opened its first in-store pub in east Belfast.

The pub is named after the store's middle aisle of special offers, where shoppers often find surprise bargains like inflatable kayaks and bench grinders.

On opening day, a local man drinking Guinness at the bar with friends filmed a video joking: who'd have guessed that after one pint you'd walk out of the middle aisle with a chainsaw and a lawn mower?

The pub uses the supermarket's signature red, yellow and blue, and the walls are stacked with instant coffee and Lidl's own-brand tomato soup.

There's very little food, basically just the supermarket's own crisps, but plenty of customers are still drawn in by the chairs made to look like shopping trolleys.

Some nights it gets so crowded that the supermarket has had to hire a team of bouncers to keep order, though that doesn't always work.

At closing time on the pub's first night, a fight broke out and the police were called.

Still, the pub is really a very practical workaround.

After the partition of Ireland more than a hundred years ago, Northern Ireland's mainly Protestant leaders used stricter alcohol licensing as a way to set themselves apart from the mainly Catholic south.

Later, hard-line Presbyterian figures such as the late Ian Paisley wanted to make drinking even harder; he called alcohol "the devil's buttermilk."

Even today, licences to sell alcohol remain tightly controlled.

You can only buy a licence from a business that has closed or stopped selling alcohol, and you must also prove that the pubs and off-licences nearby aren't enough to meet the needs of the local population.

Lidl, which runs about 13,000 stores worldwide, couldn't get a licence to sell wine, beer and spirits at its Belfast store.

So it found another way: it applied for a pub licence, and customers can also buy alcohol at the back to take away.

This unusual workaround has reignited a long-running debate in Northern Ireland: should the alcohol laws be relaxed?

Many people hope so.

Music producer Holly Lester believes the law makes it very hard for electronic music to grow in Northern Ireland.

Compared with cities like Dublin and Glasgow, Belfast has fewer venues, artists often wait months for a slot, the spontaneity nightlife needs is lost, and many popular artists simply try their luck in London.

She could only launch her new record in a café, and she says even that was hard.

But existing pub owners worry that if the rules are relaxed, the huge sums they paid for their licences will have been wasted.

According to an independent study prepared for the government, a licence can cost 120,000 pounds or more, and many owners treat it as money for their old age.

Some in the industry also warn that if the law changes, a flood of new places will open at once, and not all of them will survive.

A group Lester set up with partners is challenging the government's licensing policy in court.

Her co-founder Boyd Sleator said: you have to give businesses the chance to fail, and the chance to succeed.

While the debate goes on, the supermarket pub keeps selling Guinness and the supermarket's own beer and wine.

One woman said it's a good excuse to go to the supermarket: if you forget the toilet paper, you can have another glass of wine on the way back.

Customers have even come all the way from America and New Zealand, and a group of German tourists came to see what their country's most famous supermarket was up to.

A German tourist from Mainz said the place was number one on his bucket list.

His proudest photo was of a sign in the men's toilets: I only came in for bread.

In your view, when a law is out of date, should it be changed right away, or should the people it has protected for years be looked after first?