Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will ask a few questions myself first. I thank the Deputy for his work on this. I know other Deputies have done quite a lot of work on it. Everyone accepts it is a huge issue. I will give the committee an example. Three weeks ago, my daughters and I were going to see "Matilda" in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. It was a present from Santa Claus for one of my daughters, who is 12 and a half years of age. She had been waiting five months to see the show. As we were going into the venue, I was absolutely amazed that there were ticket touts outside the venue for what was a children's show. It was completely sold out. As my two daughters and I were walking in, a tout came up to me to ask whether I had any spare tickets. I would say an awful lot of the kids there had received their tickets as presents from Santa, given the kind of show it was. I was struck. We are used to seeing ticket touts at matches and concerts, but this was mostly a children's event. Any child there was with a parent or guardian. I was really struck by this. I knew this Bill was coming down the line so I thought the experience was very relevant.

I ask the Deputy to go into the measures that were introduced by Ed Sheeran and his promoters.

There is another family story to go with this. A member of my family was going to that concert and had bought the tickets at face value from somebody else in the family who could not go. However, there was a worry that it might not be possible to get in so it was necessary to bring the ID of the original purchaser. That was a genuine case of one cousin selling the tickets to another because he or she could not go. There was a concern however that he or she might be stopped. That did not happen. Ed Sheeran went a long way to try to sort this out but a few difficulties were still raised with it. Will the Deputy explain about the "bots" please. Is that when somebody buys up a lot of tickets and sells them at a very inflated price?