Why should the pay of those cunts be linked to a Minister’s salary? Even equating them to a serving Minister gives them an exalted level of importance.
€100k/€150k would be plenty.
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but they won’t be able to hold on to the top talent like Doirean Garrihy?? The BBC will be kicking down the door
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RTE 9 o’clock news was telling if you missed it. They started the report with Tubs celebrating his goodbyes on his last late late and then closed with video of him laughing his bollix off. I’m guessing the News team are pissed off
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He’s very popular with everyone though.
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Can someone do the necessary please?
Tell that to Emma O Kelly and the NUJ chapel
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RTÉ’s presentation of Tubridy payments ‘designed to deceive’, chair tells PAC
TDs express shock during the hearing at sensational revelations around the use of a so-called barter fund
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RTÉ chairperson of the board Siún Ní Raghallaigh and staff representative to the board Robert Shortt arriving at Leinster House, Dublin, to appear before the Public Accounts Committee. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Wire
Thu Jun 29 2023 - 19:57
The chair of the RTÉ board Siún Ní Raghallaigh said the way payments to Ryan Tubridy were presented in the broadcaster’s accounts appeared to her to be “an act designed to deceive”.
Her stark comments opened up what was described as an “extraordinary” hearing at the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday, where RTÉ chiefs faced a second round of questioning on the misstating of payments to Mr Tubridy.
TDs expressed shock during the hearing at sensational revelations around the use of a so-called barter fund, and around how two €75,000 pay top-ups were accounted for within the State broadcaster.
It also emerged that RTÉ is going to review how it negotiates contracts with agents, and is also planning to publish the salaries of other high earners beyond the top 10.
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The RTÉ executive board will also be overhauled.
In her opening statement to the committee, Ms Ní Raghallaigh said she is “appalled as to how payments were recorded and presented in RTÉ accounts”.
“What was the motivation here? It appears to me that this was an act designed to deceive.”
She also appealed for former director general Dee Forbes to appear before the committee when she is able to do so.
Ms Forbes has so far declined to appear, citing ill health, but the PAC may now seek powers to compel her.
[ RTÉ’s PAC hearing: 10 things we learned on an ‘extraordinary’ day ]
[ What is a barter account? Meaning of term at centre of RTÉ Tubridy payments controversy ]
RTÉ’s chief financial officer Richard Collins also said there was “concealment” or “deception” in some payments for the presenter. Mr Collins was also questioned on why the invoices for the top-ups were labelled as “consultancy fees”.
After auditors raised concerns, he approached former director general Ms Forbes to look for an explanation. He said he was told by her that it was “for advice that Dee Forbes had received around how RTÉ structured itself and presented itself during Covid-19”.
Geraldine O’Leary, RTÉ’s commercial director, said either Noel Kelly or the former director general came up with the terminology of “consultancy fees”.
“It was either Noel Kelly or the director general, but I’m not sure which one. So, in the absence of being 100 per cent certain, I believe it is correct to say that I don’t remember – because I don’t.”
Fianna Fáil TD Cormac Devlin said there was a notable “change in tone” from RTÉ bosses in comparison to a previous committee hearing. On Wednesday night, Minister for Media Catherine Martin said it was “vital” that RTÉ engage transparently with the PAC.
There were also fresh revelations at the committee around the use of the station’s barter account.
Mr Collins said there were transactions at a cost of €111,000 to the barter account for travel and hotels to facilitate bringing clients to the Rugby World Cup in 2019.
He said 10-year IRFU tickets were purchased with a cost through the barter account of €138,000.
In addition, there were transactions relating to the Champions League final in 2019 totalling €26,000.
Asked about the number of transactions on the barter account, Mr Collins told the committee there were “hundreds”.
Labour TD Alan Kelly asked for 20 years of transactions that were conducted through the barter account.
Former chair of the RTÉ board Moya Doherty said it was “staggering” that neither she nor her board colleagues were aware of the existence of a barter account for RTÉ during their tenure.
“None of us knew of the existence of this barter fund, which was outside of the financial department, and therefore not reported to us as a board during our monthly meetings, and did not exist in the monthly management account.
[ Miriam Lord: Where is Dee Forbes? Under the bus, was the general consensus in the committee room ]
“For me, as chair, and for my colleagues on the board, that is staggering and absolutely shocking . . . we didn’t even pick up in the corridors of RTÉ the existence of the barter fund.”
Separately, RTÉ’s interim deputy director general Adrian Lynch told the committee it was “possible” Mr Tubridy had been aware of the issue of the additional payments before his departure from The Late Late Show.
Responding to a question from Sinn Féin TD John Brady around whether he might have been told the issue was to be raised and that this might have “influenced” the timing of his departure, Mr Lynch said: “Based on the information from yesterday, it’s possible.”
There was further controversy in the committee after Mr Collins, the chief financial officer, appeared to briefly suggest he wasn’t fully aware what his salary was.
He then said he believed it is about €200,000 with a €25,000 car allowance. Mr Brady said this was extraordinary.
[
Jennifer Bray
](Jennifer Bray - The Irish Times)
Jennifer Bray is a Political Correspondent with The Irish Times
RTÉ Pay ControversyRyan Tubridy
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Loved by all his colleagues, has to be fake news the protests on the RTE campus this week
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Wonder what the theme for the toy show will be this year?
The Artful Dodger
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The PAC live for the auld grandstanding all same. It’s always been thus. Great platform for non entity tds over the years to score open goals by shouting down at sitting ducks
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Tubs will doing it, a week after his JFK assassination LLS special.
This is Ireland
That was the historic game RTÉ wouldn’t pay to show on terrestrial tv
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In Kilkenny colours?
They got options here this year.
Former chair Moyà Doherty turning up at PAC yesterday. Wtf.
Always wondered how the rights for Riverdance ended up with her and her husband making them multimillionaires rather than RTÉ for whom they were working as producers on the night of the Eurovision. It’s not like they composed it or anything.
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Justine McCarthy: Tubridy is paying a high price for not exposing RTÉ’s deceit
Folly of judging somebody’s worth by size of their remuneration is lesson Ireland has repeatedly been taught, yet never seems to learn
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While Tubridy is blameworthy for not exposing RTÉ’s deceit about his pay, he is less the cause and more the symptom of something amiss in our financial culture. Picture: Andres Poveda
Fri Jun 30 2023 - 06:00
Ryan Tubridy has a lovely home. It is a mirror of its owner – congenial with no excess bulk. This I know because I interviewed the broadcaster there at his invitation in 2021 and he proudly showed me around it. Before our meeting, the RTÉ press office ordered that his house was not to be identified and required a written undertaking in advance that there would be no questions about the Montrose star’s “private life”. The day after the interview, another diktat arrived. This one said there was to be no mention of “who appears in photographs, paintings or specific book titles in his house”. I checked the calendar to see if it was April Fools’ Day.
At that time The Late Late Show presenter’s published salary from RTÉ was €495,000. Last week, the rest of us great unwashed found out that the public service station was paying him an extra €75,000-a-year, camouflaged as “consultancy” fees and paid through a British company. When I had broached the subject of his lavish remuneration, RTE’s highest-paid presenter had replied that his lifestyle was not expensive, as epitomised by the 14-year-old car he drove. “I think if I was to end up working in a bookshop tomorrow I would downsize comfortably because my needs are not outrageous,” he said.
I believe he meant it sincerely. So why did he feel the need to extract more than half-a-million-euro annually from his impoverished employer?
Ego may be a big chunk of the reason. According to the crude calculations of the capitalist market, a person’s worth is measured by the number of zeros in their pay cheque. Fame, pampering and fans may attest to popularity, but it’s your salary that places you as the top of the heap. Being in the public eye can make an ego fragile. Tubridy hinted thus when discussing critics-in-the-street he had encountered. “It’s a pity because the neediness of this job means you don’t want to elicit that reaction from someone,” he said in the interview, “and you nearly want to go to all the people who don’t really rate you or like you and say, ‘Can we have a cup of coffee because, honestly, I’m not that bad? In real life, I’m even a bit nicer’.”
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[ Miriam Lord: Where is Dee Forbes? Under the bus, was the general consensus in the committee room ]
The folly of judging somebody’s worth by the size of their remuneration is a lesson Ireland has repeatedly been taught, yet never seems to learn. In fact, the Government might check its own integrity when it denounces RTE’s arrangement with Tubridy. Its deal with Robert Watt when he became the secretary general of the Department of Health with an €81,000 pay rise was equally inexplicable. In both cases, the organisations where Watt and Tubridy reign supremely-paid are blighted by under-resourcing and held together by workers dedicated to the public service they provide.
Paying the chosen ones huge salaries is a guaranteed way for hubris to flourish; the sort of hubris that made Watt think it acceptable to arrange a professorship for his colleague, the former chief medical officer Tony Holohan, at a potential cost to the public of €20 million.
Learn more
It echoes the self-entitlement that led bankers on bonkers bonuses to, in the immortal words of Anglo’s David Drumm, pick extortionate numbers out of their arses and collapse the economy.
RTÉ under fire at the Public Accounts Committee
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Tubridy is paying an excruciating price now. Overnight, he has been re-cast from hero to zero. While he is blameworthy for not exposing RTÉ’s deceit about his pay, he is less the cause and more the symptom of something amiss in our financial culture.
Instead of asking why he needed so much money, the question that needs to be most urgently answered by RTÉ is why it felt the need to pay it. The explanation that he was a flight-risk from Montrose to a rival station is unconvincing. Where would he have gone in Ireland? RTÉ was his brand. When I interviewed him he said the BBC had not offered him a job but that he could have moved there, except he was too much of a home bird to leave Ireland. He quoted his late father having once said: “Poor Ryan, he’d get homesick in Greystones.”
One of the trademarks of Tubridy’s Late Late Show chat style was his incessant declarations of his love for Ireland. So frequent were these professions of patriotism that some people speculated he might be a candidate in the next presidential election. Did his paymasters ever watch the show, and muse how unlikely he was to abscond to foreign shores, or wonder if he might concede in his contract negotiations that his service to his homeland could compensate for some shaving of his salary?
The other explanation often given for his bloated pay package was the benefit to RTÉ of advertising revenue generated by the Late Late Show. There is no doubt that Tubridy is a fine entertainer and brilliant with children on the Toy Show, but he was presenting the world’s longest-surviving chatshow in television’s weekly prime time slot. How did those who approved his remuneration separate the dancer from the dance?
As he finds himself at odds with RTÉ about the legal status of his contract, Tubridy is discovering the lonely reality of the maxim that everyone is dispensable. Pat Kenny, whom RTÉ was paying over €950,000 at one stage, knows it well. When he switched to Newstalk in 2013, there were dire predictions that his old RTÉ radio slot would crumble and die. It did quite the opposite. The audience actually grew when Seán O’Rourke took over as presenter.
Politicians have been asking RTÉ bosses at Oireachtas committee meetings why Tubridy’s extra payments were concealed. The answer is obvious. Had it been known he was getting more than €500,000, other presenters, with some justification, would have demanded more in their pockets too. Until a pay cap is imposed in RTÉ, including on management, celebrity agents will continue to negotiate big bucks to bolster their clients’ self-esteem. Because, as we ought to know by now, that’s the way the money goes.
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