All big music tours come wrapped in hyperbole but the forthcoming Garth Brooks concerts might, for once, live up to the bill.
No other artist has staged five concerts in a row at Croke Park, nor sold 400,000 tickets.
Big music artists usually only come to Ireland as part of larger world tour, but everything about the Brooks concerts is unique and a one-off.
The stage that is being built at Croke Park was off-limits to the media on Monday, ostensibly because of our old friend “health and safety concerns”, but more likely because the man himself doesn’t want to spoil the big reveal for fans beginning this Friday night.
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Croke Park is nearly as wide as a soccer or American football pitch is long, and the stage has to be built accordingly.
Brooks will play Friday night, Saturday and Sunday this weekend, take a break for five days, tour some of Ireland and return to complete the tour on Friday and Saturday night of the following weekend. He is also making a tour documentary about his time in Ireland. Presumably some of it will cover the debacle that was the five concerts that never were in 2014.
Aiken Promotions events co-ordinator Jim Clarke hoped it would be no less than the “best event that there ever has been in Ireland, never mind in Croke Park”.
It is like “five All-Ireland finals all coming together,” added security co-ordinator Eamonn O’Boyle, except the Dubs won’t be in it. Just 15 per cent of tickets have been sold in the capital — the nearer the church, the farther from Garth. These concerts will be predominantly for the denizens of rural Ireland, the ones who eat their dinner in the middle of the day, and are looking for a night out before the next electricity and heating bills hit the doormat. This will present its own challenges for concertgoers, with the general paucity of taxis and late-night transport. Irish Rail is adding on additional trains to Limerick, Cork, Maynooth, Drogheda, Dundalk and Belfast along with additional Dart services.
“That is going to present many challenges. We need people to think very carefully about how they get here and get away,” Mr Clarke warned. “It’s not just about getting here. It’s getting to Croke Park by 7.30pm. The last thing we want is for people to miss part of the show.”
There will be a curfew of 10.30pm, a tight one for the country titan as he regularly played for longer than three hours on his last American tour.
Fans from 30 countries are also coming to Ireland, accounting for 5 per cent or 20,000 of the tickets. Inevitably, this has put pressure on Dublin’s already overstretched hotel sector and prices.
There has been much grumbling about hotel and B&B prices in Dublin during the concerts. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) said it has received 19 complaints between February and August, but just two related to pricing issues.
It acknowledged that hotel prices have risen, but it has to be seen in the context of increased demand and less availability because many hotel rooms have been given to Ukrainian refugees. This — combined with inflation — has led to a “general incentive to increase prices”.
The CCPC added: “Generally, traders in Ireland are free to set and change their prices for goods and services. Lower prices play a key role in attracting consumers, and traders compete to keep their prices low enough to attract consumers.”
