Foreign ticket printing for security, says GAA

GAA chiefs have defended their decision to print the tickets for All-Ireland senior championship games abroad and insisted that the tender from an Irish company “is not competitive enough”.

A motion to next April’s annual Congress in Portlaoise from leading Kerry club Dr Crokes is calling on the GAA to make every effort to ensure the tickets are printed in Ireland. Finals tickets are currently printed in the US while tickets for other championship games are printed in Italy.

But GAA communications manager Alan Milton said that 90% of the GAA’s printing was carried out in Ireland and that security issues were the reason for awarding the contract to a foreign company.

“We conducted an audit recently of all our printing within the GAA and the findings were that 90% of our needs are met by Irish companies. That covers match programmes, internal documents that are circulated within Croke Park, documentation that we release to clubs all over the country.

“The fact is that a few years ago we introduced a security feature in our All-Ireland championship tickets. It’s a special method called thermo-printing whereby there is no ink involved. It is heat based with the letters and numbers burned onto the tickets. At the time when we implemented that system, there was no company in Ireland capable of producing the tickets with that type of technology.

“That situation has changed since then. There is now one company in Ireland that I’m aware of who possess that technology and are capable of printing the tickets with the necessary security feature. But when we put it to tender, there was large difference in terms of the prices being quoted. The Irish company’s tender was just not competitive enough.”