Electric Picnic numbers set to grow beyond 60,000

As Electric Picnic 2019 drew to a close, festival organisers hailed the event as one of their most successful years to date and said there was room for Ireland’s largest music festival to grow further.

Speaking on the final day of the festival, Electric Picnic CEO Melvin Benn said this year’s record-breaking festival capacity of 60,000 could be expanded in future years, with this year’s addition of an entire new area called Freetown expanding the annual three-day event’s ability to cater to bigger crowds.

But Mr Benn said that any growth would be gradual and sustainable, and that the festival could count on a further 10 years at its current home in Stradbally, Co Laois.

“I’m going to try to accommodate more people who are desperate to come to the Picnic,” he said. “I’ll look to grow the numbers a little bit more.”

Mr Benn said the popularity of a new 8,000-capacity dance tent in the new area called Terminus, which enjoyed large crowds all weekend, meant it was “already a fixture” for future years of the festival.

Electric Picnic 2020 tickets are due to go on sale next Saturday at 9am.

Overall, the weekend was carried off smoothly; a heavy Garda presence and a strict search policy saw some punters complain of delays as queues mounted at entrances from the campsites, but Mr Benn said that, in co-operation with the Gardaí, searches were scaled back over the weekend to facilitate revellers attending the acts they wanted to see in good time.

Despite a summer of warnings regarding high-strength ecstasy tablets and a tragic fatality at Cork’s Indiependence festival in July, Mr Benn said the festival’s drugs approach had not changed.

“We said we’d have a zero tolerance towards drugs, and that isn’t dramatically different to last year or other years,” he said. “The Gardaí have made decent seizures and we’ve been working hand in hand with them.”

Warnings from organisers didn’t deter punters keen to attend the final day of the festival from a stiff trade in re-used wristbands, with Facebook pages offering traded wristbands from people leaving the festival early for an average of €50.

Final acts on Sunday evening at the main stage were homegrown Dublin band Kodaline and Florence and the Machine.

Meanwhile, with the festival clean-up beginning on Monday morning, Mr Benn said he was hopeful that this year could see an improvement over previous years, where footage from the campsites has shown thousands of abandoned tents, sleeping bags and other camping gear.

Local charity PATH (Portlaoise Action To Homelessness) were taking donations of leftover tents and sleeping bags dropped to the Civil Defence tent for punters too tired to face carrying their gear back from camp sites to the car parks, but the main message from festival organisers is to bring home and re-use their tent.

“Take your tent home; the message is loud and clear,” Mr Benn said. “It feels like the message is beginning to resonate with people. People say it’s the retailers’ fault for selling cheap tents, but really, it’s up to the individual to take their tent home and reuse it again.”