As the father of a psychology student I’m intrigued by what you mean here 
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A lot of these RTÉ superstars went down the contracting route of their own volition. Set up companies into which RTÉ paid the fees they negotiated. They didn’t get the security of a staff position with pension etc but it was much more tax efficient for them & ultimately a larger annual income amount. A lot of them didn’t countenance the boy Bakhurst or the newish head of radio lass simply deciding not to renew their contracts.
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Hard to explain but reading it made a lot of sense.
Had several interactions with Ray at our time on Blackboard Jungle in the mid 90s - not a bad scout and he was down with the kids. George Byrne the quizmaster on the other hand was a massive cunt.
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Are you “fond of a drop”
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George Byrne was that your man that was mates with Ian O’Doherty and Declan Lynch?
Correct big rovers fan. We called him out on an ambiguous answer and he was wrong and he lost it
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He had the head of a very unpleasant person!
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What do you mean the quiz master ?
He set the questions
The great football question - what was the Republic of Ireland’s managers name in 2001?
Heimur 
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King Shithole. A small bovine individual, with much to be small about, much to be bovine about. And an utterly shite drummer. I saw him in action, various ways.
Himself, Declan Lynch and Ian O’Doherty were well matched. Behind the bluster, they were all employed as a ‘journalist’ – and the other two only remain employed as a ‘journalist’ – because they cravenly did/do as told and wrote/write as told. Declan Lynch had the same relationship to Eoghan Harris’ arsehole as Bettystown has to the Irish Sea, that concentrated pucker through thinning options.
I suppose, if you are an obnoxious Irish personality alibi merchant, as per that trio, becoming an anti GAA ‘revisionist’ journo is a handy way of peddling yourself.
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He said his departure from the broadcaster “came out of nowhere — although they say that they had given me warning, they hadn’t. But unfortunately there’s no recordings of any conversations”.
He has repeatedly claimed RTÉ failed to properly communicate with him for a long time, which the broadcaster rejects.
D’Arcy maintains he was somewhat blindsided by the news.
“You have to go into a situation where you have to tell somebody some bad news. And you talk around it and maybe you think that you’ve communicated the bad news but you haven’t. So, I suspect that might have been the case on a number of occasions when certain people were asked to do a job and maybe didn’t do it well enough.”
He describes it as “the ultimate irony”, given that RTÉ is in the business of communication.
…….
“I was on a two-year contract,” he says of his most recent employment status. “It would have been up at the end of the year in December.”
He had taken time off for his summer holidays and another week off when his mother, Mary, died. Then, the JNLR listenership figures came out and he was conscious they were down to 182,000, a drop of 10,000 from the last quarter.
Liveline also shed thousands of listeners after Joe Duffy’s departure, dropping 8,000 down to an average of 299,000 per show, which impacted D’Arcy’s show, aired immediately afterwards, he feels.
“We inherited a portion of their listeners, so if they go down, inevitably then we go down. I had in my head that they can’t blame us for something that we’ve no control over.”
He met with Monahan at the end of September.
“In my head I was thinking, ‘This is going to be about my salary level’. They had said after [the RTÉ crisis] that maybe within two years everybody will be staff. I was on contract so I was expecting maybe that was the negotiation. And I obviously knew that the JNLR figures were going to come up,” he says.
After some “small talk”, he says “Patricia Monahan said The Ray D’Arcy Show is not coming back in the new year”.
Just like that?
“Just like that. I could feel the blood drain from my face. I felt like the floor had fallen out beneath me. So, anything I’d prepared [to say] was gone.
“There was nobody else in the room, which I think maybe there should have been somebody to witness it. I was in shock. I cycled home. I had been in and out of RTÉ since 1988.”
RTÉ said D’Arcy did not request to have a representative at the meeting, and while it does not have a recording of the meeting, it has a written record of what he said.
After the meeting he found Jenny in the kitchen and broke the news.
“Jenny was in disbelief. But she had wanted me to leave for a long time. She saw I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t being the person that I could be on air. So, after the initial shock, I suppose I would have carried [the feeling] longer, but it’s difficult when your wife is shouting ‘freedom’ in your face. So, it was an enforced liberation. You don’t have control over it, but liberation is usually a good thing.
“Jenny kept reminding me, ‘You were treated like you were an intern’. And an intern shouldn’t be treated that way either. But anyway, I attempted to take stock of it.
“I had been going home to her for a long time, giving out. I was offloading on to her. And that’s not nice.”
Sometimes people can stay in a situation they’re not happy with out of fear, I suggest?
“That’s it. I’m completely risk averse. I would never have left on my own accord. Leaving is probably what I should have done. But that doesn’t in any way absolve them for what they did to me,” he says.
Monahan met him again on the following Thursday, where she offered him a slot on RTÉ Gold.
“I discussed it with Jenny and some other people, and I just wasn’t going to take that because it would mean working in an organisation that didn’t really want you.”
By October 17, the Sunday Independent had contacted him to ask if his show had been dropped. He thought at that point his news was being kept private, and after the leak he decided not to go on air.
“I was asking at every juncture: ‘Who knows?’ I was told three people knew. But I was suspicious that other people knew, just by how people were around me in the office.
“On top of everything else, there’s a bit of public humiliation there. Because you’re losing your job. And most people, although we’re advised not to let this happen, but we get a sense of ourselves from what we do.”
That your identity becomes tied in with your job?
“Yes. And when that’s taken from us, it’s a huge blow.”
How did it affect your mental health?
“Jenny is a big fan of Buddhism. If you pick up any self-help book these days, there’s traces of Buddhism there, or the Stoic philosophers. This too will pass. That wouldn’t be my default position but as you get older and wiser you say ‘this is something that’s very unpleasant, but it will pass’.
“And I suppose I have enough experience to know that I can do certain things without having it to be validated by somebody in RTÉ.”
He talks about being part of the Scope inquiry by the Department of Social Protection into RTÉ. It was held to examine the employment status of over 695 contractors to determine if they were incorrectly classified as self-employed, rather than as employees and he filled out an in-depth questionnaire.
“They’re trying to establish if you should be listed as an employee and I was doing 60- and 70-hour weeks when I was working in television and radio. I remember at the time I could feel this tingling in the side of my face and I had a lump… and it was all the physical manifestation of stress. And it was peak Twitter as well.”
Did he ever consider legal action against RTÉ for the way he feels they handled his departure?
“You go through everything in your head,” he says, but he decided against that approach feeling it would be “toxic”. He also acknowledges he sought advice but “the contract was up, so I had little or no rights”.
When Monahan informed him his show was cancelled it was less than 10 weeks after his mother had died.
“What happened there doesn’t compare to losing my mother in any way, shape, or form. There’s no comparison.”
I wonder if he feels it was ruthless that the organisation let him go so soon afterwards?
“You can’t let somebody losing his mother dictate your policy decisions in an organisation, can you? I’m asking the question, I don’t know.”
He says his experience in RTÉ was very restricted. “People aren’t given enough agency. And yet they’re being judged by the outcomes. So, that is a ridiculous situation.”
On the publication of RTÉ’s highest paid presenters every year, he said: “It’s a bit embarrassing. We became whipping boys. There was a particular point there when Dee Forbes was DG [director general] and the government were at RTÉ and she made promises to them about reducing the salaries.
“It struck me that we were just pushed out. People would say, well good enough for you because you’re paid well enough to put up and all of that. But I think just because you’re well paid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be well treated.”
He said there was “a constant tension” between on air-presenters and ‘the suits’ in RTÉ.
“At some stage, somebody who is a presenter is going to look around at what they do and what figure they’re on and then look at somebody else and what they do and what figure they’re on — and they’re going to go to Kevin Bakhurst [the director general] and say, ‘we want more’.
But he feels contracted presenters deserve more due to what he calls “the three Ps” — “a lack of permanence [in contract], a lack of privacy and most importantly lack of pension”.
Is he financially secure for the future after RTÉ?
“Jenny would always say, ‘If they get rid of you tomorrow, we can do this and this and this’. So, we always had a well-rehearsed escape plan. We still have those options. But I still have at least 15 years work in me.”
Some of his advice to RTÉ chiefs now he has left is to recognise it does not have a monopoly on public service broadcasting. He points to work by Bauer Media and Virgin Media.
“I had to pull somebody up on this in [RTÉ] when it was announced that Claire Byrne was leaving. The person was looking down their nose at Newstalk [part of Bauer Media] and mentioned that we do public service broadcasting and I was saying, ‘Well, come on now’. I think they were taken aback at how forceful I was about it.”
He believes there is “fear at every level” in RTÉ.
“We’re in a world that’s changing at a rapid speed that’s happening at an exponential rate in the media and they don’t seem to have the flexibility. They’re not nimble. They’re not agile. They know that themselves. So, I’m not saying anything they don’t know.”
Before it all fell apart he was nurturing an idea for a new series called Being Human in which he would attempt to understand the human experience of well-known people.
After our interview he sends me the first episode and it’s obvious he’s on to a winner. He has also been reading books by the philosopher Alain de Botton and Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals as he starts his new chapter. But there is one thing he knows he still has to face.
“My mother was the first person that I really loved who died. So, I don’t know if I’ve dealt with it, because the other happened in quick succession and took over. So maybe at some stage in the future — when I’m out the other side of this — I’ll start dealing with that.”
In response to issues raised, a spokeswoman for RTÉ said that D’Arcy was aware for some time that “nothing was guaranteed post the end of his current contract”
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What a fanny.
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Such a whiner!
I’d almost have fore respect for Tubridy, whose shameless self confidence and innate arrogance will always reassure him that he has been and always will be, in the right.
Also - bad form.fhom D’Arcy in the interview in the Times mourning his late mother and describing his father a “a bit of a prick and bit of a drinker”
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I wonder would Niall Breslin’s latest offering be any use to him….
We’ve reached uncharted levels of neediness……COTY winner - the polls don’t lie….
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The gang may be ‘back together’ but ‘Ray D’Arcy Daily’ feels like a rerun of a past radio episode
Summarise
I can’t remember exactly where I first heard it, but the line stuck with me. A character in some TV show joked that “Opinions are like podcasts – everyone’s got one, and nobody wants to listen to yours”.
It does seem like that at times. Such is their preponderance that frequently, on setting up their own podcast, people ironically joke that there are too many already. It’s particularly true for those who already work in media: someone loses their current main gig in telly or radio and, almost for want of any better idea, announce their forthcoming podcast.
Major case in point, the two fallen soldiers of recent RTÉ purges. Ryan Tubridy, carving out an online presence for two years, and Ray D’Arcy, who left the national broadcaster last autumn this morning began his own podcasting – hateful word but oddly appropriate here – “journey”.
Ray D’Arcy Daily runs, as the title suggests, every Monday to Friday. A second show, the weekly interview-based Being Human, is coming soon; this one hews closer to the format and feel of his radio output.
As D’Arcy’s longtime life and work partner Jenny Kelly (who produces) announced last week: “This five-day-a-week show is nothing new, and yet ALL NEW [with] Ray giving his own worldview while surrounded by friends: me, Mairéad Ronan and Bernard O’Shea to name a few.”
If that sounds very much like The Ray D’Arcy Show on RTÉ, or indeed the other Ray D’Arcy show which began on Today FM way back in 1998 – I feel faint typing that year – you’re not mistaken. A listener could have caught part of this debut and not known whether it was a rerun of some past radio episode.
Is that good or bad? Time, and audience numbers, will tell, I suppose. On one hand, it’s a fact that D’Arcy was hugely popular for two decades-plus. On the other, JNLR figures had slumped before his show’s cancellation.
Ray D’Arcy and Jenny Kelly
More than that, programme and presenter had been sounding tired for quite a while. Maybe, taking the long view, this enforced change will be good for D’Arcy. So should he therefore have gone radical, veering off in entirely new directions?
Or maybe it’s just the case that, understandably, they’re going with what they know for a start, seeing where the show itself decides to go. Indeed, he admitted to feeling nervous the night before this first podcast.
For now, we got familiar D’Arcy fare, beginning with a statement of ambitious intent: “We want to change your listening habits.” The hope is that this will find a place within people’s “daily arrangement with different podcasts” – what they listen to while doing housework or the school run.
He then moved on to a vox pop: “What would you like to do daily that you don’t already?” And an opening monologue, familiar from the radio show.
D’Arcy touched on eavesdropping in cafes, recommending songs, going incognito in beanie hat and glasses, the documentary The Slightest Touch, Colin Farrell running a marathon topless, the oldest man in Ireland and, in a callback to his own impassioned campaigns on reducing traffic deaths on Today FM, a new road safety website.
It was fine, sort of gently engaging, although, at the bones of 20 minutes, too long.
Mairéad Ronan was on hand to offer some social media promotion suggestions. Photo: Steve Humphreys
He then welcomed Mairéad Ronan, old friend and Today FM/RTÉ bandmate, to talk Dancing with the Stars. Primarily, a guy called Paudie who apparently should have been chucked off by now but hasn’t for whatever reason and isn’t much of a dancer but at the same time can kind of dance. Strictly – no pun intended – for fans of the TV show.
D’Arcy then asked her for advice on social media promotion, prompting an amusing conversation. Ronan suggested something called “a trending piece of audio” (no idea) and warned: “Don’t post and ghost” (still no idea). He also had a nice story about his late mother keeping clippings of magazine and newspaper pieces.
There was a quiz, D’Arcy had playfully promised earlier that of course there’d be one, and they wrapped up with five minutes with Jenny: chatting about obscure coffees, running, dad bods, the aforementioned oldest man and a list of thanks to people who’d wished them good luck. We ended with the traditional D’Arcy sign-off: “Talk to you tomorrow!”
Earlier, Ronan had declared “The gang is back together”. It’s more than that, really, every element of The Ray D’Arcy Show seems to have been reassembled. It wasn’t “rock your socks off” exciting, but as a first effort, it was grand; inoffensive background noise while you go about your day.
And in fairness, isn’t that the whole point of most podcasts? So I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes over well with the public. I might not be tuning in myself, though – at least until they cut that monologue in half.
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Part 2 on now. We were some banana Republic. Susan o Keeffe the journalist who broke the story on World in Action was a brave woman. Door stepped Goodman outside mass. Dermot Ahern in the dail the next day pretending to be appalled thatvan ‘honest man’ had been accosted outside his place of worship.
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Haughey was most likely a far bigger gangster than we have yet realised
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