Two years on from the RTÉ scandal that became the greatest show on earth, a cast of 11 Montrose managers returned to Leinster House to meet the Oireachtas media committee. After Ryan Tubridy’s spectacular flame-out, this sequel was never going to match the original version.
TDs and senators concentrated their questions on a new television marketing campaign for the news division, which is still in production, and on a €3.6 million writedown over a partly abandoned IT project.
The marketing campaign has angered some RTÉ staff, not least because actors were hired as extras to film marketing shots about news production.
Director general Kevin Bakhurst, who said his job was to “clean out the stables”, complained of “inaccurate” reporting on this issue. On the suggestion special props were used to improve how the studio looked, he said that was nothing more than two plants being moved from elsewhere in the building.
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Extras were engaged because the time required for filming would take journalists from their work, RTÉ said. When director of news and current affairs Deirdre McCarthy noted the extras were obscured in the film anyway, one committee member said it seemed actors were paid not to act.
The cost of the marketing production thus far was €77,000 plus VAT, with “five or six” people in Brussels this week for additional filming.
Committee chairman Alan Kelly said most observers would consider it “bananas” for an organisation such as RTÉ to engage an external crew to shoot a marketing film.
Bakhurst, however, said RTÉ crews were busy on their own work.
On the IT writedown, he accepted the deficit was “significant”.
Still, the political magnitude of the issue seems to have been lost on RTÉ management until a February submission to Minister for Arts and Media Patrick O’Donovan after the botched Arts Council IT project.
RTÉ’s IT loss cost more than the €2.2 million failure of Toy Show The Musical, so why weren’t top executives seized of the matter?
Bakhurst said he took the reins only in 2023 and that the impairment was dealt with on the watch of previous finance chiefs. Nothing was hidden, he insisted. Advisory body NewERA, which provides advice to Government on its shareholdings in state companies, had itself sought clarification on the issue.
Although RTÉ argued the impairments were properly set out in its accounts, accounting rules are a world away from the heat of an Oireachtas committee.
Kelly, the chairman, asked why O’Donovan’s department never raised the matter when RTÉ was under intense political scrutiny two years ago. “No red flag was raised with the department in relation to it by RTÉ or by NewERA – and we didn’t raise a red flag in relation to it,” Feargal Ó Coigligh, department secretary general, said. “I think things would be very different today.”
All of this flows from ructions over Tubridy, the man long gone from RTÉ but whose ghost lingers.
Bakhurst said Tubridy had not returned €150,000 from the fateful Renault deal that set off the 2023 avalanche. RTÉ had “no legal basis” to compel repayment, but “we’d like him to”. Asked whether he expects the former Late Late Show host to take a legal action over the affair, Bakhurst did not expect so, “but you never know”.
Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly, was mentioned only briefly, but there was no information on the extent of any current dealings of the latter with other RTÉ stars.
Two presenters are still paid more than Bakhurst’s €250,000 salary under legacy arrangements, but no one will receive more than him in future.
After fireworks two summers ago over rampant junketeering and huge severance pay, this was not quite the stuff of high drama.
