The 2025 Electric Picnic is set to be the biggest event in the music festival’s 22 year history.
EP Republic Ltd, the company behind the annual three-day festival at Stradbally Hall Estate in Co Laois, has confirmed it intends to seek permission to increase the numbers attending each day to 80,000.
This is 5,000 up on the 75,000 tickets that were sold for the 2024 event.
Tickets for the 2025 EP event went on sale on August 21st, selling out within hours even though no acts had been confirmed at the time.
Now, in a statutory public notice, EP Republic has said that it is applying to Laois County Council for a licence to hold the outdoor musical event under Part XVI of the Planning and Development Act 2000.
The notice states that “the anticipated number of audience attending the event is 80,000 people each day”. The notice also states that “early entry camping will be open to a maximum of 40,000 people”.
This year’s event returns to the traditional last weekend of August where it will run from Thursday, August 28th to Sunday, August 31st.
The first Electric Picnic was staged in 2004 when around 10,000 people attended.
At the conclusion of last August’s event, promoter Melvyn Benn of Electric Picnic hinted at the planned increase for the 2025 event. He said at the time that he intended to talk to Laois County Council about the possibility of increasing capacity, but was “quite happy with where we are right now”.
The sale of 80,000 tickets would guarantee the promoters a box office of at least €18 million at the loyalty scheme price of €225 per weekend camping ticket.
The most recent accounts for EP Republic Ltd show that it posted profits after tax of €1.56 million in the 16 months to the end of April 2023.
The accounts show that the company paid out dividends of €7 million to its Irish parent firm and Denis Desmond’s MCD joint venture with Live Nation, Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings Ltd in 2023.
EP Republic Ltd needs to lodge the licence application for the 2025 event over the next two weeks, after which members of the public have three weeks in which to make submissions.
