Dublin VegFest 2016

On Sunday I headed up to Dublin to meet Lucy and Laurence at Dublin Vegfest. I was really looking forward to it and had booked the tickets some time ago.

Three hours on a train and two bus rides later I was finally at Griffith College where the event was being held. There were security guards asking if people had tickets, as I had I went through and joined a queue to get in. Only to be told 15 minutes later that the queue was for people who didn’t have tickets. So why didn’t the organisers have two queues?

Anyway I made my way to the door and after some difficulty with people not knowing how to scan my ticket I got in. Lucy and Laurence were in the queue outside for Moodley Manor, so I joined them for a chat and when they’d got their food I went to go and get some food in the food hall.

Yes, you’ve guessed it another queue! There were too many people in the food hall so they stopped letting people in until some left. This was the order of the day, while all this was going on the queue outside for people waiting to buy tickets was getting longer and longer.

I expected to queue to get in, it’s the norm with any event but I didn’t expect to have to keep queuing throughout the day. Surely the organisers must have know the capacity for the building? Even the stall holders obviously weren’t expecting such a crowd as some of them sold out of their products a couple of hours into the event.

Now don’t get me wrong I think it’s a great idea for a festival but it seemed to be very badly organised. When we eventually did get it I enjoyed seeing the stalls but I would never go back again. I felt sorry for people with babies who were asked to leave their buggies outside and goodness knows how disabled people would have got on.

I didn’t even bother going to any of the talks because the rooms were just overflowing with people. For an event who has the ethos of caring for animals there didn’t seem to be much care taken of the attendees.

Anyway that’s just my opinion and I’m sure some people had a wonderful day. We left early and went elsewhere.