Formal paperwork from collapsed Irish ticketing company tickets.ie says that the loss of two major clients and poor sales forecasting contributed to the company’s demise. The business shut down at the start of June shortly after an Irish bank holiday weekend when three festivals that used tickets.ie took place, events that are now collectively owed €600,000. 

Meanwhile the company’s founder, John O’Neill, has told Irish music magazine Hot Press that he left the business in February 2025 and was “saddened and shocked” when he heard about the sudden closure last month. Although he retained a minority stake in the tickets.ie company, he says he had not been involved in running the business since the start of last year. 

Tickets.ie was previously bailed out in 2022, following COVID-caused challenges, by German live entertainment giant DEAG via its UK division, which took a majority stake in the Irish company. A source has told Hot Press that that bail out included an agreement by DEAG to “underwrite any shortfall in customers’ funds”, but that commitment expired in October last year. 

Hot Press also notes that one of the two major clients who stopped using tickets.ie – as referenced in the formal paperwork – was promoter Singular Artists, which is majority owned by DEAG’s KMJ. Which possibly means the promoter didn’t feel the need to keep using tickets.ie once DEAG was no longer obliged to prop the company up. 

The formal paperwork, seen by IQ, has been submitted by directors of tickets.ie as part of the liquidation process. They say that the other key client that stopped working with the company was the Taste Of Dublin festival. The loss of that festival as well as shows promoted by Singular Artists worsened existing cash flow issues. 

The directors say that concerns about the financial health of the company began at the start of January 2025, prompting them to take advice from accountancy experts. However, the departure of O’Neill the following month, which presumably reduced costs, meant directors could see “a path to returning the company to profitability”.  

According to a liquidator’s report from January 2025, at that point tickets.ie was ‘cash flow solvent’, meaning it had enough cash on hand to pay immediate and upcoming debts, even though it was probably ‘balance sheet insolvent’, meaning its overall liabilities exceeded its assets. 

Aside from the impact of the lost clients, the directors say another problem was incorrect assumptions that had been made about what ticket sales income would need to be paid out in the short term versus that which could be paid out in the longer term, providing cash flow in the meantime. 

The company assumed that approximately 25% of money would need to be paid out in the short term and 75% in the longer term. But by May, forecasts started to “skew more heavily towards the shorter term event sales”, escalating the cash flow crisis. 

The impact of the collapse of tickets.ie on the Irish live music sector – and especially the three festivals that are together owed €600,000 – continues to cause concern, and has already prompted calls for new regulation of the Irish ticketing sector.  

One of the affected festivals, the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival in Ballyshannon, has launched a GoFundMe to raise money to help it weather the storm caused by the tickets.ie situation. It has so far raised €49,000. 

Organisers of the festival, who describe the collapse of tickets.ie as “a devastating setback that has placed enormous pressure on our voluntary organisation”, say, “we continue to pursue every available legal avenue through the Irish High Court liquidation process in an effort to recover the funds owed to the festival”. 

But, “at the same time, we remain determined to secure the festival’s future through a range of fundraising initiatives and the incredible support of our global Rory Gallagher family”. 

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