Electric Picnic festival boss defends crowd handling after a collapse

Electric Picnic drew around 80,000 people to Stradbally Hall in County Laois between August 28 and 30, and two of those days produced crowd incidents serious enough to change the running order. Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic, has defended how the site handled both.

The first came on the Friday evening, when Armand Van Helden was due to play a 90 minute set on the Smirnoff stage. Large numbers arrived as he was about to start while others were trying to leave, and the resulting crush ended in a collapse. One attendee told The Journal it felt like a silent bomb blast and was the most terrifying thing they had experienced. Another, Aoife McKenna, described total mayhem, with people falling on top of one another as more kept arriving.

The set was cancelled before Van Helden reached the stage. Bars nearby were closed and announcements went out over speakers and screens asking people to disperse. Van Helden addressed it afterwards on Facebook, saying he was gutted but that the health and wellbeing of everyone attending comes first.

Asked at a press conference whether the festival needed to improve crowd control, Benn rejected the premise. "Quite frankly, I don't think it could have gone better," he said, and called the suggestion that changes were needed after the Saturday incident bonkers. Once McKenna's account was read to him, he said organisers acted as soon as the collapse became apparent, that medics and security were present, and that Van Helden was stopped from starting. He said no other stage had a crowd collapse over the weekend.

The Saturday problem was different in kind. Crowds several rows deep built outside the Electric Arena during Duke Dumont's set, with stewards and gardai trying to limit numbers approaching the tent and alerts going out through the festival app. That show went ahead while staff worked to disperse those who could not get in. A reporter from The Journal who was there called the area crowded but not unsafe, and Benn said the audience was respectful and there was no real drama.

Sustained heavy rain ran underneath all of it. The Coca-Cola tent was evacuated on the Friday when a large volume of rainwater came through the structure, and campsites and walkways were left waterlogged, with wood chips spread later to make the ground passable.

Capacity is the number the arguments keep returning to. Electric Picnic has grown roughly 15 per cent since 2023, from around 70,000 to 80,000, and Benn said before this year's event that he had no current plan to seek another increase. Asked whether the bigger dance acts belong in bigger rooms, he said the festival is in a really good place on crowd handling. Last year a Fatboy Slim secret set on the small Salty Dog stage was cancelled once word spread, with Benn saying at the time it would have been impossible to stage safely.

The bill itself was headlined by Lewis Capaldi, Gorillaz and Fontaines D.C., who closed the Sunday after topping the bills at Reading and Leeds. Sombr brought out Noel and Mike Hogan of The Cranberries for Zombie during the weekend. Other electronic bookings and site news are logged on the festival tracker, and MusicSuey has also covered Fontaines D.C.'s coming album Dopamine Chamber.