Peter Aiken, Bruce Springsteen’s Dublin concert organiser, has expressed regret to the multitude of fans who were left frustrated and in the dark, still standing in queues outside Croke Park whilst the Boss and his crew commenced their performance on Sunday evening.
The Irish tour finale of Springsteen and his renowned E Street band was a rousing spectacle, performed before over 200,000 spectators in cities including Cork, Kilkenny, Belfast and Dublin. The concert was executed with tremendous energy underneath pleasant sunshine.
Discontentment thrived, however, when the concert started around 7.15pm, about a quarter of an hour behind schedule. Images and videos of elongated queues on the access roads to Croke Park emerged on various social media platforms soon after.
The long queues, coupled with the lack of clarity about the predicament, sparked anger amongst numerous concert-goers, with some describing the situation as a complete “mess”.
Peter Aiken, the concert arranger, owned up to the delays encountered by fans. He admitted that while certain contributing factors were out of his crew’s control, the accountability for the mishap ultimately lay with him.
“The venue’s doors were officially opened at 4pm and immediately around 10,000 fans were inside. But by 6pm just about 25,000 of the 82,000 ticket holders had entered. I was constantly checking my phone and social media, puzzled as to the whereabouts of the rest,” said Aiken.
Between 6pm and the originally intended launch time of 7pm, there was a sudden increase in audience members passing through the security perimeters around the stadium.
In this large-scale event however, stewards had to verify all tickets, which was done quite a distance from the stadium and contributed to the formation of the long queues along Clonliffe Road, heading towards the venue.
There were additional setbacks in the scanning process of the e-tickets, as bright sunshine glaring on the phone screens significantly delayed operations.
“On normal days, a ticket can be scanned within a few seconds. But due to glaring sunlight, a ticket was taking over 15 seconds to scan, which further prolonged the delays,” elucidated Aiken.
Mr. Aiken acknowledged that the scanners’ inability to process tickets at their usual rate was the issue. He conceded that the situation was unsatisfactory in no uncertain terms, as 70,000 tickets had been checked by the time Bruce Springsteen took the stage. Further ticket processing only concluded 20 minutes into the performance. He admitted that the situation was clearly not ideal. People from across the nation had travelled to watch the show, and even though everyone was inside within the first quarter, no one would have wanted to skip any part of it.