Electric Picnic’s festival director has dismissed crowd safety concerns as “bonkers” despite attendees describing “chaos” and “unsafe” conditions at shows over the weekend, one of which had to be cancelled.
Several people who went to see the Armand Van Helden set at the Smirnoff Stage on Friday described their concerns at how “mobbed” it was.
Speaking to The Irish Times, one woman aged in her 20s said it was “way beyond capacity” and she was “getting pushed consistently for an hour”.
“Then Armand was probably about 10 minutes from playing, and the crowd just shoved everyone and we all fell like dominoes,” she said.
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“I did start crying after,” she said. “When you can only see people’s shoulders ahead of you for a mile, it’s a bit scary.”
Another woman, aged in her 30s, described it as “chaos” and “hell” trying to leave the venue.
“Carnage is putting it lightly, to be honest,” she said, adding that a similar issue arose during the Duke Dumont set on Saturday night and she believed it was “unsafe”.
“We ended up leaving,” she said.
Footage has been circulating on social media of large crowds tightly packed at the Smirnoff Stage on Friday night, while some commenting on Duke Dumont’s set claimed it was “above capacity” and a “health and safety issue”.
Those attending the 80,000-capacity festival received alerts on their phones on Saturday, warning them that Duke Dumont’s set at the Electric Arena was at capacity.
“Please do not make your way to the stage,” it said.
Asked during a press conference on Sunday if improvements were needed surrounding crowd control at the festival, Festival Republic managing director Melvin Benn described the handling of the Duke Dumont set as “the perfect operation”.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think it could have gone better. Certainly, Duke Dumont last night was really, really popular and the tent was full. Around the external of the tent was pretty full, so we were holding people back,” he said.
“There was no real drama at all, so the thought that you might be suggesting that it needs to be improved, quite frankly, is bonkers because it couldn’t have gone better.”
Asked about the cancellation of Armand Van Helden’s set on Friday night, Benn said the DJ was “clearly” booked for a stage he was “too big for”.
He said the show was cancelled as organisers were “not willing” to risk injuries or people’s lives.
Put to him that attendees described it as “terrifying” and “very dangerous”, Benn said: “We were outside, and we stopped it immediately as soon as we could see a crowd collapse.
“There was no crowd collapse at any other stage or any other time. I don’t know why the crowd collapsed at that point, but the moment that it did, we stopped it. We had medics there, we had security there, and we stopped Armand Van Helden going on stage,” he said.
Benn said the festival was “in a really good place in terms of how we handle crowds”.
