‘There’s no such thing as a bad seat in Croke Park on All-Ireland final day’

There are no lights visible at Donegal County Board offices from the laneway leading into MacCumhaill Park.

A training session is taking place on the back pitch and the car park is packed but the offices 50 feet away are in darkness.

An approach to the green door is greeted by a patrolling garda car slowing down. Only a small number know that upstairs in a small office off the boardroom, millions of euros worth of All-Ireland final tickets are being printed and processed for the clubs of the county. County secretary Aodh Mairtín O Fearraigh ushers me inside. The gardaí drive on. Up the dimly lit stairs and through the canteen and boardroom, one finds office administrator Noreen Doherty focused on inputting numbers on one computer while her nieces, Imelda Collum and Lynn McGowan, handle the tickets feeding off the two thermal printers, Noreen’s twin sister Mary Collum is on tea and coffee duty and has just returned with some chips to keep the workers focused.

“It’s like printing a lotto ticket,” says Aodh Mairtin of the process. “All tickets are printed using thermal printers so it’s not a case of running out of ink. Bear in mind, we’ll be printing 16,000 tickets so we can’t afford to be running out of ink. As you can see it’s a slow process for the tickets to come out.”

It’s laborious. The county receives an allocation in different sections of Croke Park and each club receives tickets based on that. The Lower Hogan Stand is the first on the list and Aodh Mairtín sits down to match the allocation with the available seats, calculator tapping the numbers in one hand, mouse clicking and totting up the numbers on the screen with the other.

“Croke Park give us the places where each club gets their tickets,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a bad seat in Croke Park on All-Ireland final day. Everyone is looking for a middle Hogan Stand ticket. There’s this myth that it’s the ticket to get. Saying that we were delighted with the allocation we got in the Lower Hogan. There were plenty of good Upper Hogan and Upper Cusack in the middle of the field too.”

Another query is solved as well. Why clubs don’t get all their tickets in one block? Aodh Mairtín is looking for 28 tickets but the most in the one place is 12. He picks it and flicks through the rows adding up the allocation. Three here, five there, they all tot up.

“I add them up, make sure it adds up to 28 and put that in the cart for the order. Once you do that in every section and make sure there’s the right number of tickets ordered you finalise the cart and start printing.”

Behind him lies thousands of blank tickets. Each in blocks of 1,000. More tickets than they can print but with good reason.

“If you are doing two orders of 400 and 500 you really wouldn’t use that other 100. You’d be putting in a new batch so you’d have a lot more to spare,” he says.

“If it stops in the middle of a run it’s okay because if you put in a new batch it carries on. But you have to be careful. We had one mistake here tonight where a ticket crumpled in the feed and we don’t have the facility, which we used to have, to return and destroy and reissue the ticket.

“It has to be done by Croke Park so we have to send the bar code, serial number and ticket number to Croke Park.

“The mistake happened when two tickets fed into the roll. But they will cancel it and reissue it. That will be done tomorrow morning. We’re not doing too bad, though, with only one mistake after 10,000 tickets.”

Out in the boardroom lies the mother load. Printed tickets sitting in bundles, enveloped, with the names of the clubs and amount owed, they wait until the order is complete and are placed in a secure location before being distributed to the clubs the next day.

And that’s when the real fun begins...