Tickets for an extra Oasis concert sold briskly yesterday evening after the promoters offered them on a credit-card only scheme. Last night the organisers said that while the special telephone "hotline" they arranged had been very busy, they would not know until this morning if all the tickets for next Wednesday's concert in Dublin had been sold. Mr Denis Desmond of MCD, the concert promoters, defended the decision to sell tickets only to those with access to credit cards, a method one TD said limited potential purchasers to "an elite few". Mr Desmond said the decision was made after discussions with the Garda. i. When tickets went on sale earlier this month for the two Oasis concerts initially planned, crowds of more than 1,000 queued overnight at HMV's Henry Street and Grafton Street stores in Dublin. Most were ordered to leave without a ticket, and there was extensive media coverage of fans' dissatisfaction at the ticket sales arrangements. "Following the scenes surrounding the sale of tickets for the first two concerts, we and the gardai decided in the interests of law and order and public safety, that the tickets for the extra concert would be sold by credit card," Mr Desmond said.
The Fine Gael spokesman for Youth Affairs, Mr Denis Naughten TD, said MCD should have found a way to make the tickets "more accessible to the general public rather than leaving it to an elite few".