THOUSANDS OF GAA supporters travelling by rail from Kerry to Sunday’s All-Ireland football final in Croke Park will be paying more than three times the fares available at other times, and may have to pay up to nine times the standard price for tickets to the match itself.
Iarnród Éireann has said it will not apply the usual internet-based discounts to tickets for supporters travelling to and from the capital for Sunday’s senior football final against Dublin. A spokeswoman said “this is a very busy weekend so we wouldn’t be offering many discounted fares on the web”.
Cheapest available one-way tickets on two special match trains on Saturday and on Sunday morning are priced at €37 when booked online. A return ticket is €72. Iarnród Éireann web fares for previous weekends and the weekend immediately after the match were advertised at as low as €10 one-way.
There is not much joy on match ticket prices either, with black market trade remaining brisk – despite warnings from the GAA.
A pair of premium seats monitored by The Irish Timeswere sold on eBay on Tuesday for €1,060, while a similar pair were being sold on needaticket.ie for €1,600 – almost nine times the €90 most expensive price from official GAA ticket outlets for a single ticket. Some websites were offering to raffle match tickets at €10 per raffle ticket, but none of the sites seen revealed how many raffle tickets would be issued.
The GAA has warned that where it is aware of a ticket being sold in this way it may cancel the ticket and reissue a replacement. This would leave holders of such tickets without Croke Park access.
The situation has angered Kerry South TD Michael Healy-Rae, who said the GAA has “serious questions to answer” on how legitimate tickets for Sunday’s All-Ireland football final were ending up on internet websites.
Kerry GAA county committee chairman Jerome Conway said supporters would be “more anxious about getting a train ticket than getting a ticket for Croke Park”.
He said that in the past match ticket holders had been left without a train ticket and “no way of getting to Dublin”. This year he said Iarnród Éireann had laid on a lot of extra capacity, and supporters were relieved.
He said the price, at €72, was the standard five-day return, which he frequently paid as someone who travelled regularly.
A spokesman for the county board said there was a “tremendously positive air in Kerry since Killarney won the national Tidy Towns award”.
:quality(70)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/irishtimes/8a09a42a-bf7b-491e-848d-432f8309b3fa.png)