Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for my late arrival. I appreciate the Leas-Cheann Comhairle has facilitated my speaking slot. Deputy Richmond decided to walk to the convention centre rather get a lift with me, which would probably be illegal anyway, so he was here before me.

This Bill is welcomed by the Labour Party. We can all appreciate the burden carried by the events industry and the workers in it, particularly those involved in music, arts, cultural festivals and large sporting events over the last 14 months. If we are lucky and reach a high vaccination rate, I hope we will see a return to being able to go to gigs, matches, shows and theatres, which we have missed so much, as soon as we possibly can. The human need to get together in celebration of life itself through events of all shapes and sizes, whether these are sport, music, art, performance or festivals, has never been more apparent. We miss it and its value has never been more keenly felt.

In that context, this Bill is as important as ever. The Bill looks to address the blatant exploitation by ticket touts, middle men and online scalpers of the huge demand for sporting, artistic and cultural events to drive huge profits into their own pockets well beyond any work they have done to earn the money.

It is a classic example of where unfettered market rules disadvantage ordinary people, act as a drain on society and need to be curtailed for the common good. The pre-Internet days were bad enough for ordinary fans who could not get tickets, often being priced out of the chance of getting a second-hand ticket by the huge mark-ups charged by professional touts. Anyone who goes regularly to gigs or matches will know the feeling of being left with a spare ticket or multiple spare tickets due to the last minute backing out of a friend or group of friends from an event. You used to have to go to the ground and hope you could tell the difference between a genuine fan looking to see a match and a scalper looking to make a margin.

It was a badge of honour for ordinary fans not to sell to ticket touts but with the advent of online selling, more and more people have been sucked into the idea that buying tickets for a big event is an opportunity to make a few quid. A larger and larger proportion of tickets seem to end up being bought at a price far higher than face value. Online ticket bots and sites have become an ever larger problem with orchestrated attempts to corner whole events and then drip feed the tickets out to genuine fans, to try to extract the last penny of cash far above the face value of the ticket.

This is unbridled capitalism in its most naked expression and I welcome the Bill from the Government. It follows on from Bills from former Deputy Noel Rock and the now Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and from Deputy Quinlivan, all of whom should be congratulated for ensuring the issue became highlighted and is now being addressed.

The other industry where we have an orchestrated drip feed of supply into a market of unsustainable prices by profit-driven monopolists is the property market. Some of the principles of fairness and capping sales prices at a sustainable level might be applied to try to solve the ongoing housing crisis in the country and to allow the property market to become one where builders are incentivised to create and build affordable homes for people and families, rather than one where speculators drive and create shortages and bubbles to exploit for maximum gain.

On the detail of the Bill, I note the Department said it had been intended to tackle the use of bot software to purchase tickets but that it now plans to implement that as part of a Bill to implement EU Directive No. 2019/2161 on the better enforcement and modernisation of Union consumer protection rules, to be submitted to Government early next year. The delay concerns me as the bot issue should be addressed urgently and to pass a Bill without bot provision could conceivably leave us longer than necessary without appropriate protection.

Within the Bill there are specific provisions for Euro 2020. Given that we are no longer hosting matches, do we need such specific provision in the legislation in the pandemic? The Bill also includes for secondary ticket markets the defence that they were providing an online service for others to comply with Directive No. 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce in the Internal Market. The concern I have is that the defence could be exploited to allow the profit of secondary platforms from this now illegal activity, based on them only supplying an information service to the people committing the crime. While it would be difficult to prevent private conversations through online and social media platforms like email, Facebook, Instagram or other services, platforms and actors could build a business model explicitly on the sale of tickets while turning a blind eye to lawbreaking and over-face-value sales and would be able to use section 26 as a defence to render the Bill ineffective and flout the law.

Many of the other provisions of the Bill seemed straightforward mechanisms for application for registration of venues and events. These designations seem reasonable, as do the provisions for arrest and the penalties. I look forward to a constructive debate and may submit amendments as needed.

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