How much should an RTÉ presenter be paid? “A lot less than they’re getting right now,” will be a popular response, but the actual numbers game is coming more clearly into focus now we know that, if he had returned, Ryan Tubridy would have been getting “significantly less” than €200,000, which was the sum he was previously entitled to for the radio portion of his old contract. Now that negotiations have been summarily ended by RTÉ, the message is clear. The rules of this game have changed for good and nobody is indispensable.
That message will be heard loud and clear by the broadcaster’s other top presenters. So what might that mean for them?
When the payments controversy erupted last June, presenters who appeared on RTÉ’s highest-paid list publicly revealed their current remuneration. Some also offered slightly more detail on the breakdown of fees than we’ve previously had from official RTÉ releases.
Claire Byrne gets €280,000 for presenting her two-hour current affairs show from Monday to Friday. Miriam O’Callaghan is paid €263,500 for her Prime Time duties, presenting TV documentaries and hosting her Sunday morning hour-long Radio One show. Joe Duffy receives €351,000, of which €300,000 is for presenting the 75-minute Liveline five days a week, with the remainder for, he told his listeners in June, “whatever they ask me to do on television”. Brendan O’Connor is paid €245,004 for his two eponymous two-hour weekend radio shows.
[ Tubridy in talks to return to RTÉ on salary ‘significantly less’ than €200,000Opens in new window ]
[ RTÉ seeking clarification from Ryan Tubridy over statement on income reportOpens in new window ]
A 25 per cent reduction across the board on the same basis as Tubridy’s is one possibility. A more drastic reduction based on hours on air (taking into account that television commands higher rates than radio) would see dramatic cuts for Duffy and O’Connor but a slight increase for Byrne. However, it’s not as simple as that. Other factors – the presenter’s profile, the nature of the programme and where it sits in the schedule, the amount of advertising revenue it generates – come into play.
There is also the question of the supposedly open marketplace in which RTÉ competes for on-air “talent”. The broadcaster has been heavily criticised for overestimating the risk of defections by star presenters to commercial competitors and for overpaying them as a result. RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh acknowledged as much when she told the Oireachtas Media Committee that “RTÉ is bidding against itself in the market and that’s part of the culture as well, maybe that applied at some point in time, but that’s not the way the market is working – I think we all know that.”
It is not entirely clear to the outside observer what the market really is for broadcasting talent in Ireland. Newstalk, the rival national talk radio station, is less reliant on the personality-driven model of programming it previously employed around presenters such as George Hook and Ivan Yates. Its roster is now mostly filled with competent, less high-profile broadcasters while its biggest and most expensive star is its only significant acquisition from RTÉ, Pat Kenny. It’s now over a decade since the 75-year-old Kenny joined the station, and he shows no sign of wishing to retire. Over at Today FM, another former RTÉ man, Ian Dempsey, has been filling the morning slot since 1998, while Matt Cooper has been presenting drivetime current affairs show The Last Word for more than 20 years. Not much sign of a dynamic marketplace there. If anything, most of the movement has been in the other direction, with Claire Byrne, Ray D’Arcy and Sarah McInerney arriving in RTÉ after stints in the private sector.
We don’t know how much Kenny or Cooper (both clients of Tubridy’s agent Noel Kelly) are paid for their services, although it’s reasonable to assume it’s a lot more than €200,000. But the purse strings are generally kept pretty tight at Bauer Media, owners of Today FM and Newstalk, as they are at Virgin TV, whose highly formatted domestic programming is not particularly personality-driven. Generally, all of the above operate on tighter budgets with smaller production teams than RTÉ’s, and their presenters appear to get less time off too. The new regime has now made it clear that it’s quite prepared to let stars leave if necessary. That gives RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst the strongest of hands at the negotiating table.
Clarification
This article was amended on August 18th to clarify the range of duties involved in Miriam O'Callaghan's contract
