The vast majority of tickets to the World Meeting of Families in the RDS in August have sold out and people may have to be turned away, the organisers have said.
All but a few thousand of the approximately 70,000 tickets for the event on August 22nd-24th have gone, they said. A one-day ticket for the event costs €38.
Meanwhile, up to 545,000 tickets for Pope Francis' appearances at Knock shrine in Co Mayo and Dublin's Phoenix Park, on Sunday August 26th, become available online on Monday at worldmeeting2018.ie
Fr Tim Bartlett, WMoF2018 secretary general, said that with record registrations for the RDS, his concern was that a lot of people may suffer disappointment when registrations close shortly.
International registrations for the Dublin event are the highest recorded since WMoF began in 1994. “We should be incredibly proud as a country that we have, by a factor of at least two to three, brought in the highest ever international registration for a World Meeting of Families pastoral congress,” he said.
However, he said tickets would not be available for the Festival of Families event at Croke Park on the evening of Saturday, August 25th, which will be attended by Pope Francis.
“We do not expect to be able to release tickets publicly for this event,” he said. Any extra places “would be made available to the homeless, refugees, to those working with or supporting those dealing with drug addiction, those helping families in need in our society”. These were “the people Pope Francis wants to have near him, that he wants to meet,” he said.
People with three-day tickets for the pastoral congress at the RDS will also be provided with tickets for Croke Park and the mass in the Phoenix Park.
“Every parish of the 1,365 [in Ireland] will receive 10 tickets for Croke Park and we’re asking every parish to ensure that at least one family is represented in that 10,” said Fr Bartlett.
Tickets for Knock and the Phoenix Park Mass on August 26th will be bar-coded to prevent touting.
“For Knock, every ticket will have to be associated with a particular individual’s name, simply because of the smaller scale [45,000 capacity],” he said. “For Phoenix Park every ticket will have to be associated with the verified email address of the group leader.”
