TICKET sales giant Ticketmaster.ie has been heavily criticised by Fine Gael and a consumer watchdog for operating its own ticket-touting website.

When Ticketmaster.ie customers log onto the website and find that tickets for an event are already sold out, they are given the option of buying from another Ticketmaster-owned website called Get Me In where tickets to the sold-out event are guaranteed, often at inflated prices.

Olivia Mitchell, Fine Gael's arts, sport and tourism spokeswoman, has branded Get Me In as "an abuse that occurs almost inevitably in a monopoly situation. Ticketmaster describes it as a marketplace but it is far from a normal market. They, in fact, are acting both as monopoly buyer and seller, controlling the entire market."

Mitchell recalled how Ticketmaster welcomed an anti-ticket-tout bill, produced a few years ago and added, "It now seems they were anxious to stop individuals touting to allow their own wholesale abuse of the market. It is totally reprehensible but legislators face the same difficulty trying to control this practice as they do in controlling or taxing other internet sales."

She said the pressure to stop Get Me In must come from venues, promoters and artists "who will get a decreasing cut of the take if this manipulation of the market continues. And of course the poor individual consumer will pay more and more."

The Get Me In website claims that it allows customers to buy and sell tickets in "a safe and guar- anteed way". There is an argument that the website offers a forum for fan-to-fan ticket sales. But critics argue that it is merely a Ticketmaster-owned touting website, given that tickets are sold at inflated prices, including some to September's Michael Bublé concert at Lansdowne Road.

A spokesman for Ticketmaster Ireland told, "Get Me In is not a Ticketmaster Ireland website. We don't redirect anybody to Get Me In." While Irish customers are not automatically redirected to the touting website, Get Me In does sell tickets for Irish events.

The Consumer Association of Ireland has echoed Fine Gael's view. The organisation's chief executive, Dermot Jewell, said: "To be honest, I believe that the system for allocating tickets is entirely lacking in transparency and is therefore misleading to the paying consumer who actually naïvely believes that he or she has the option to purchase any ticket on the date announced for any concert.

"The reality is that there have been prior purchases for allocated tickets to customers of American Express, O2 and many, many more companies who have first option through corporate agreements on various venues for their customers.

"Add to this the announcements, which you correctly refer to, that all seats are sold out only to later find that Ticketmaster itself, through a separately owned subsidiary, sells a held-back block of tickets at prices that are extortionate. This is bad business and presents the company with an ethos that is low in ethical concern in its dealing with its customers.

"All in all this is a situation of blatant abuse by a dominant service provider and it must be stopped. We urgently require our legislators to climb down from the fence and act immediately to ban ticket touting in all of the various guises that have been shown to us over the years. There would be strong EU-wide support for such a measure. In the interim, there is little that can be done as we are powerless to act in any meaningful way to stop Ticketmaster."