Pakistani firm apologises for directing Dubliners to nonexistent Halloween event

A Pakistan-based company has issued an apology to Dubliners after a “human error” on its events website led to thousands of people turning up on the Irish capital’s main thoroughfare for a nonexistent Halloween parade.

Footage on Thursday night showed throngs of people lining both sides of O’Connell Street waiting for a supposed procession of giant Halloween puppets made by one of Ireland’s best-known theatre groups, the Galway performance company Mácnas.

The film-maker Bertie Brosnan said: “I was there filming for 40 minutes. From Parnell Square West – both sides of the street – people were packed five to 10 deep, lined up all the way down around the corner as far as the spire. Thousands were there. The Luas [tramline] was completely blocked on both lines.”

The crowds had turned up to see the event which was listed as taking place on the My Spirit Halloween website. When bemused crowds began to be dispersed by gardaí who told them no such parade was taking place, they suspected a scam, or some seasonal tricker.

But the company behind the website now says the phoney event was neither. Instead, it was a simple human error.

The website falsely advertised that the Mácnas parade would take place between 7pm and 9pm on Thursday after a member of their team had cut and paste the notice for last year’s event and inserted it into this year’s calendar.

The site, which aggregates content all over the world was one of the highest ranking Google Halloween entries in the days before 31 October, and the posting on the parade was shared widely on social media.

The Pakistan-based man behind the site has since apologised saying he was “depressed” and “embarrassed”. “We are highly embarrassed and highly depressed, and very sorry,” Nazir Ali told the Irish Times.

“It was our mistake and we should have doubled checked it to make sure it was happening. But newspapers are reporting that we posted it intentionally and this is very, very wrong,” Ali said.

After the error became apparent to people who had turned up for the event, a wave of amusement on social media – but also warnings about the dangers of misinformation and AI deepfakes – was unleashed.

Some joked that there would have to be a “parades commission” set up, like in Northern Ireland. The Belfast journalist Allison Morris said on social media that she “laughed at the fake parade story” but it showed “how easy it is to spread misinformation”.

One user on X said: “This is just halloween, now think of how many people are fed with misinformation online on other issues.”

Gary Gannon, a Social Democrat TD – a member of parliament – said it showed the power of misinformation and deepfakes. He referred to a deepfake of Taylor Swift endorsing the Kerry politician Michael Healy-Rae.

“That was quite funny, but all of a sudden when that becomes something a little bit more serious and people are putting out AI images of me, for example, saying something that I would never say contrary to my own values, that’s something that’s not too far off the horizon,” he told RTÉ.