A Different View with Dave O’Connell

For all of those giving out about the price of All-Ireland Final tickets, the truth is that we’d probably pay twice the official price of €100 to get in there and find ourselves in a good seat.

But that doesn’t make it right.

It might be somewhat palatable if you were within earshot of the Ard Comhairle box or indeed anywhere central in either the Hogan or Cusack Stands. But the €100 ticket price also applies if you’re way up in the gods behind the goals.

And for those of us who ‘saw’ the All-Ireland Football Final from the Davin Stand, a couple of rows from the back, a hundred quid bought you a unique perspective of proceedings – but only if your idea of a good view is the back of the giant television screen that allows the rest of the stadium to see action replays.

But those of us high in the sky saw neither the action nor the replays, because the screen came down to the top of the crossbar at the Hill 16 end. So you’d have seen a goal if there was one at that end, and you’d have to rely on the crowd noise on the points.

Because – irony of ironies – the back of this giant screen also obscured most of the other giant screen at the Railway End. So you didn’t even have the benefit of seeing it all in hindsight.

Venues of all sorts across the world – from sports stadia to theatres – offer cut-price tickets for areas with restricted views. But not Croke Park, which operates a socialist version of capitalism; all tickets carry the same high price.

The ten per cent increase in ticket prices this year was justified by the GAA President Jarlath Burns on the basis that it’s the first increase since 2018, but that’s not really much of an argument. Price increases aren’t justified just because you haven’t had one in a while.

In private enterprise and in pure economics they can be explained by the laws of supply and demand, but when it comes to a body that has received millions in taxpayers’ money, it should only be down to increased costs or a problem in paying staff.

Perhaps the GAA’s controversial GAAGO experiment with RTÉ to put matches behind a paywall was behind the price hike, given the fall-off in revenue from that streaming service in the last accounts published for 2022.

Pictured: The restricted view from the back of the Davin Stand.