Irish arm of Electric Picnic owner Live Nation pays out dividend of €4.5m

The Irish arm of live entertainment giant Live Nation last year paid out a dividend of €4.5 million. Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings Ltd paid out of the dividend last December after a record 70,000 music fans attended the firm’s Irish flagship event, the Electric Picnic music festival in Stradbally, Co Laois, the latest accounts show.

Denis Desmond, a director of Live Nation, described this year’s Electric Picnic as “the best ever”.

The Irish subsidiary, which operates Electric Picnic, EP Republic Ltd, paid a dividend of €7 million to its parent firm on December 6th last. This allowed Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings Ltd in turn to pay out the €4.5 million dividend on the same date.

After not taking place for two Covid-19 hit years, Electric Picnic returned last year and those performing included Arctic Monkeys, Dermot Kennedy, Picture This and Anne-Marie, with the three-day music festival selling out within an hour of going on sale.

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Tickets for the 2024 event sold out earlier this month.

The new Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings accounts for 2021 – signed off on July 31st last – disclose that “the company is undergoing a project to design and ultimately build a new event centre”.

The location of the new event centre was not disclosed. Live Nation already operates the 3Arena in Dublin.

Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings Ltd is owned by the London-registered LN-Gaiety Holdings Ltd

Promoter Denis Desmond is a co-owner in the London-based joint venture with Live Nation.

Live Nation Gaiety Ireland Holdings recorded zero revenues in 2021 due to the shutdown of the live entertainment business arising from Covid-19 restrictions that year. The firm recorded a modest loss of €6,156 in 2021.

The accounts show that subsidiary EP Republic Ltd had shareholder funds of €7.54 million at the end of 2021 and recorded a post-tax loss of €326,446 due to Electric Picnic not taking place in 2021.

At the end of December 2021, the company had accumulated losses of €2 million while its cash funds increased from €7,561 to €346,168.