THE FOUNDER OF a live events company has said he is concerned that he might “never see the money” owed to the firm after the collapse of Tickets.ie.
Tickets.ie, Ireland’s largest independent ticketing company, was founded in 2004 and handled ticketing for thousands of events over its 22 years.

In 2022, German live-entertainment group DEAG acquired a majority stake in the ticket company.

However, in early June a statement on the Tickets.ie website said the company has “ceased trading and the directors are taking steps to place the company into liquidation and appoint a liquidator over the company”.

Rory Kelly, who founded MRK Events around a decade ago which runs events primarily in Donegal and Derry, said he has received no communication apart from the statement on the Tickets.ie website.

“You’re emailing a dead inbox that nobody’s monitoring, and I have a feeling that inbox is filling up pretty quickly,” Kelly told The Journal.

“You don’t know whether you’re going to ever see that revenue [from ticket sales],” said Kelly.

“It’s problems that we didn’t envisage having that we now need to solve.”
Tickets.ie had been Kelly’s go-to ticket platform for many events, including his successful Wile Craic Comedy Festival, which recently held ten shows across several days.

He noted that there are contracts and payments agreed not just with the individual talent, but also with staffing and venues.

While Kelly said sponsorship allows his company to “look after a few bits and pieces”, he was banking on ticket revenue to take care of most of the bills.

“With us being independent, it’s coming out of my pocket, it’s coming out of anything that I’m earning or anything that I have to earn on the outside of what we’re doing with MRK.”

Kelly said Tickets.ie had been “very on the ball” and that there had been “no indication there were these kinds of problems”.

“We literally logged on to look at our sales from a show on the Sunday and we had the invoices sent out,” said Kelly.

“All was normal, the invoice was due to be paid in the next couple of days, but it wasn’t paid. At that point there were two quite significant bills outstanding.

“Sure enough, a couple of days later, you log on and it says the company has ceased trading.”

Kelly said he “always thought that ticket money should be an escrow” but that it’s his understanding that this wasn’t the case.

An escrow account is a holding account managed by a neutral third party.

“When you’re working with a ticket supplier, it’s escrow or nothing, and it appears that in this case, there was no escrow involved.”

He added that it’s the “unknown that’s really hurting us”.

“We’ll keep going and just ask for patience with everybody that’s worked with us over the six weeks or so, where money is tied up from.”

‘We’ve been burned by this’

MRK Events is an independent promoter and Kelly noted that most of his suppliers are also independent.

“We don’t have the luxury of having hundreds of thousands of euros in the bank to just turn around and pay people.

“We’re having to talk to each act and to all our suppliers, and just say, ‘we’ve been burned by this, can you be patient with us’.

“On a case-by-case basis, you’re trying to come up with a resolution while in the back of your mind going, ‘we might never see this money’.”

Kelly said he has been working with an artist over the past few years as both manager and promoter and that they recently sold out a big show in Belfast.

“You can’t even draw down that money now,” said Kelly, “Money that’s so important to an independent artist paying for everything that’s involved with putting on a tour.”

Meanwhile, Kelly said the collapse of Ticket.ie is having an impact on upcoming shows and that the lost data is almost as important as the money.

Related Reads

Government will do all it can for festivals after ticket firm collapse, minister says

Fingal County Council says Nathan Carter show to go ahead despite ticket platform facing liquidation

Country music festival says it's owed €135k as Ireland's largest ticketing company collapses

“We need access to all those customers because they’ve bought tickets to our shows, we don’t have any of their names or email addresses,” said Kelly.

“Their data now is up in the air somewhere with this liquidation.

“We have no access to how many tickets were sold for around eight shows that we had on sale.

“We can make an educated guess, but it’s damage limitation because we have no access to any of that money, so we’re starting to reschedule shows for later in the year.

“These acts agreed things with you, and then you’re nearly at a point where you don’t have answers for them.

“You’re having to kind of kick the problem down the line, hoping that something favourable is going to happen with an outcome of the liquidation.”

‘Manage it ourselves’

Enterprise Minister Peter Burke said he has asked his department to investigate what supports might be available following the collapse of Tickets.ie.

“I have asked my department to investigate what we can do and what support we can have in this regard, but I don’t want to make false promises,” said Burke.

Kelly said that he is “planning for an eventuality that doesn’t involve funding from the government and how we’re going to manage it ourselves”.

He added that his Plan B is based “on the off chance that we manage to recoup some of the money that we had on the platform”.

“I can always be hopeful,” said Kelly, “but understanding of the way liquidation works, it’s the big bills that get looked at first and then it’s the smaller ones like us that get kicked down the line a little bit.

“You make these promises and sign these contracts with people, and we still have to honour them at the end of the day and we’ll do our best to do that.”
Tickets.ie and DEAG have been approached for comment.