Fine Gael TD’s campaign to stop ticket touting aims to change exploitative  Irish ticketing market

FINE GAEL TD Noel Rock is pushing forward with his bill to outlaw the above face value sale of tickets, with the long-term campaign proving a popular bid to stamp out the current legal and thriving secondary ticketing market in Ireland.

Rock, who’s at pains to clarify that his bill is targeting only “above face value” resales – and takes no issue with legitimate onwards sale due to personal circumstances – told the Gazette this week that the bill is currently being held up by a consultation process taking place in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, before progress to the next stage.

The problem, he explains, continues to grow. “There’s a consistent pattern of popular, high-profile events selling out in minutes,and reappearing at high value on ticketing websites almost immediately,” Rock explains, citing LCD Soundsystem at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre and Danish singer MØ in The Academy as recent examples. “It’s legal currently, and real fans are being squeezed out.”

“The difficulty is, I don’t really trust the industry to make it difficult. There are a lot of vested interests in the market, and there’s very little motivation to make the market customer friendly. There are also some quite dubious practises.”

“There are certainly cases where companies offer a ‘guarantee’ of a ticket that a customer has paid for, that essentially says they will either be provided with a ticket, or with their money back. That’s not much of a guarantee in itself, but it’s also common to substitute tickets in other parts of a stadium, for example. What kind of customer service is that, really? It’s mis-selling.”