Summer Sessions to be cancelled?

One of the promoters of the Iveagh Gardens Summer Sessions, John Greaney, says that the May Bank Holiday event will “in all probability be cancelled."

This follows the announcement by one of the headliners, The Human League on Friday, that they were pulling out of the gig. Their statement – details of which are disputed by Greaney – reads as follows:

"We have been forced, reluctantly, to withdraw from this event by the repeated failure of the promoter, Mr. John Greaney of The Event Company in Naas, to make any of the scheduled payments we were due under the terms of our contract with him whatsoever, indeed he has to date paid us nothing at all to guarantee this show and this despite our giving him several extensions to the original contracted deadline. He has also now stopped replying to our e-mails and all attempts to contact him by telephone this morning have failed so we must regretfully conclude that he has no intention of honouring our agreement with him and act accordingly.

"We would urge any and all of our fans who bought a ticket for this event to contact their point of purchase for a refund and again we offer our sincere apologies for this turn of events. We have tried our very best to ensure this concert took place but without some guarantee our costs will be reimbursed to us we cannot book air tickets, ferries and so on, so events are now beyond our control."

Talking to Hot Press this morning, John Greaney said, “It’s true, they haven’t been paid but that was partly down to a delay in them providing us with bank account details. I have been available and in contact with the band’s manager, Simon Watson, who I’ve worked with before on a gig by the Fun Loving Criminals who he also manages. The fact of the matter is that we’ve only sold £50,000 worth of tickets for a gig that will cost us €500,000 to stage. We had an additional financier to ready to come in but he got afraid when sales didn’t take off as we’d anticipated. Even if we cancel now we’ll be down €200,000."

Reacting to online criticism from Human League fans, Greaney continued: “I’m no novice. I put 30,000 people into a stadium in Galway for a Westlife concert and brought the likes of Il Divo, Jose Carreras and Bryan Ferry to the Kildruddery House Festival. We’ve sent out 250,000 texts, got coverage on Today FM and in the Irish Times and Hot Press and everything else we could do to promote it. I asked Simon Watson if they’d hang on ‘til after one of the other big names, Stereo MCs, had appeared on Friday’s Late Late Show – we’ve had on acts there before and immediately shifted 1,000 or 2,000 tickets – but they didn’t want to wait and made their announcement beforehand.

"All of the ticket money is still in the Ticketgroup.ie account, so if the Summer Sessions is cancelled people will get full refunds within seven to fourteen days. We’ve really done our best on this and would like to apologise to fans for any inconvenience caused."