“It was unprecedented,” Aiken says of the public demand for five shows. “I’ve never seen it in my lifetime promoting. It would have been the equivalent of the time Michael Jackson did eight nights in London. It would have been the equivalent of when Bruce Springsteen did ten nights in Giants Stadium in New York or when Roger Waters did five nights in Argentina. This was our big moment and I never saw it coming.
“We built the show for five nights - we were going to film it on three nights. They were going to make a documentary about it.
“We still had demand after the fifth show,” he stated. “It was nothing to do with greed.”
Highlighting the scale of the show, Aiken said Brooks and his entourage were to be issued with 520 Access All Areas passes as opposed to the 50 or 60 normally required for Croke Park shows.
Asked about the €227,000 in interest said to have been accrued from ticket sales, Peter Aiken told the committee that he was “down seven figures in this” having paid deposits on rent, sound, lights, staging, ground cover, advertising and hotels for Garth Brooks and his crew.
As for the crunch meeting with Dublin City Council when the idea of five concerts was floated, Peter Aiken continued: “I’ve been around a long time, and been around a few situations, and I did not come away from that thinking ‘we’ve got a problem’. If I had thought, at any stage, that we had a problem, then I would have flagged it to Garth Brooks. I never seen this coming.
“I thought the problem I was gonna get was this injunction, this guy running around doing all the interviews. That’s what I had planned my legal thing (around); when I met my lawyers, we had prepared a legal document to fight that. I never seen this coming from Dublin City Council. I’ve never been refused a license. I think the license system does work. It was unprecedented to sell this amount of tickets. Never seen it coming, and I don’t think it will happen again in my lifetime.”