Ticket wars - What a U-turn

ANYONE trying to get a ticket for Croke Park on Saturday cannot but be amazed at the prices they, and tickets for other high-demand events, are fetching.

If you are not prepared to fork out multiples — last night €70 tickets stood at nearly €600 — of face value forget about it. The days of getting a ticket from your friendly club secretary are long gone to be replaced by all sorts of hucksters. That is why it is so difficult to understand what GetMeIn.com, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster, is at. Last year, Ticketmaster threatened to cancel tickets that had been fairly bought and paid for, and to block further applications from those who had bought but later sold those tickets.

They wished that they — Ticketmaster — should be the last profit point in the process, a quaint but daft aspiration in a capitalist economy. Now GetMeIn.com are huckstering with the best of them, asking fantastic prices for ordinary tickets. What a U-turn.