President Michael D Higgins calls for ‘accountability’ on RTÉ pay controversy

President Michael D Higgins has called for “the fullest accountability” around the ongoing RTÉ pay controversy.

Speaking at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions biennial conference in Kilkenny today, the President said: “Public service broadcasting is crucial. I know nothing about any of these deals.

While saying it would be “unfair” to comment on specific cases, he said: “Let there be process and, as I have been saying about everything, let there be the fullest accountability. The great pity of it is, have we been damaged by this? Yes.”

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Meanwhile, an emergency motion welcoming the independent review into the administration at RTÉ, and urging the Government to commit to a new funding model for the broadcaster, has been unanimously passed by delegates at the conference.

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Delegates backed a call for the review to look at the workplace culture within the organisation, and said best practice regarding employment standards as well as corporate governance are “essential in the operation of a public service broadcaster”.

The NUJ’s Seamus Dooley told the conference the governance crisis at RTÉ had arisen because “editorial and ethical values had been subordinated to commercial considerations” by senior management at Montrose who had been as guilty of “a conflict of values as a conflict of interest”.

The financial crisis, he said, was the product of the outdated funding model and “the successive governments who failed to provide the fund required to sustain public service broadcasting”.

Two other unions, Siptu and Connect, proposed the motion. The former’s Theresa Hannick said the unions were “especially pleased” to see the second aspect of the review announced by Minister for Arts and Culture Catherine Martin “which is the review of contractors’ fees, HR and other matters”. This, she said, unions had raised with the Minister last week.

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“This is an executive board which refused to acknowledge for years it was engaged in a system of bogus self-employment. When we were talking about low-paid workers, the executive board refused to pay them pensions, sick pay, maternity and other benefits.

“It is sad, when we have been raising these issues for years, that it took people bending over backwards to pay more money to just one person” for the issue to be highlighted, she said.

Aside from RTÉ, the conference’s first day was mainly taken up with motions on Northern Ireland and the economy.

Proposing a motion on the cost-of-living crisis, Siptu general secretary Joe Cunningham told delegates the Government should make greater use of powers to control prices while private sector pay rises could and should be paid out of the excessive profits being made by many companies at present.

“We need to return to the fundamental issues of what we produce, how we produce it and who benefits from that production. We need a new economic and business model that can address these deficits, confront the central challenges that we face, and put the Irish economy on the high road of inclusive and sustainable growth,” said Mr Cunningham.