Riverdance directors share pay bonanza of €1.63m

The creative forces behind the entertainment phenomenon, Riverdance, have shared a pay bonanza of over €1.63m over the past two years.

The show, spawned from a seven minute long interval performance at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year and has been seen by more than 23m people over the past two decades.

Accounts just filed by Moya Doherty and John McColgan’s Abhann Productions Ltd for 2014 and 2013 show that directors’ pay over the two years topped €1.6m. Both share a seat on the board with David Orr and aggregate pay to directors more than doubled last year from €540,023 to €1.1m.

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary celebrations, the firm returned to pre-tax profit after its gross profit more than doubled to €3.16m. The firm recorded pre-tax profits of €711,092 after recording pre-tax losses of €555,151 in 2013.

An examination of Abhann Productions Ltd’s accounts between 2000 and 2012 shows that the married couple shared directors’ pay, including pension contributions, totalling €75m.

Four other people served as directors of Abhann over the period. However, the vast proportion of the directors’ pay would have been received by McColgan and Doherty who each own a 50% share in the business.

Last year, the business continued to flourish on the back of dates in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, Switzerland, Ireland and the UK.