Only time will tell if public's trust in national broadcaster has been lost or merely dented

ANALYSIS:Axing the programme without altering the current affairs agenda smacks of rebranding

THE CHANGES announced to RTÉ’s current affairs output and personnel are merely a way-station on a downward spiral that will end only when the disastrous Mission to Prey programme is fully and finally dealt with.

It was hard to see why director general Noel Curran chose yesterday to announce the revamp when publication of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s report into the programme is imminent.

Was this a pre-emptive strike? Or a self-imposed contribution to death by a thousand cuts? What was the point of shifting some personnel involved with the Prime Time Investigates strand, of which the programme formed part, when further changes will almost certainly be necessitated by the authority’s finding and the penalty that will likely accompany it?

Curran argued that the personnel changes were made necessary by the decision of Ed Mulhall, managing director of the news and current affairs division, to retire and that of Ken O’Shea to resign his post as director of current affairs. The process of reorganisation had been in train for months and it was time to start moving ahead.

Yesterday was a black day for both men, but it is far from the end of the trauma resulting from the false rape accusation against Fr Kevin Reynolds, the missionary who featured centrally in the programme.

Both men along with it reporter Aoife Kavanagh and executive producer Brian Páircéir remain the subject of a number of internal inquiries as well as a newly announced external inquiry chaired by former senator Maurice Hayes.

The loss of Mulhall will be sorely felt; despite his understated presence, he was a talismanic figure within RTÉ news and current affairs, someone who inspired colleagues and backed quality journalism at home and abroad. It is ironic that after a stellar career, Mulhall should fall not because of a complaint from the politicians he so often had to fend off but because of errors made in reporting the story of a cleric in the Catholic Church, which itself has suffered a massive loss of trust in recent years.

O’Shea brought a brasher, tabloid approach to current affairs programming, which had its successes before going seriously wrong in Mission to Prey and other recent programmes. However, his vision was not universally shared by RTÉ journalists before the current problems arose and with hindsight it seems that these voices could have been listened to.

The decision to kill off Prime Time Investigates was inevitable, but its replacement by new strands of investigative programming under another name smacks of rebranding. Curran admitted it was a mistake to run hour-long shows back-to-back in the same week, placing the producers under huge pressure to produce the goods and justify their input of time and resources. In future, he said, programmes would be broadcast when they were ready, rather than when the schedule demanded.

Trust is an elusive commodity in journalism, slowly built up over years and easily lost in a moment’s madness. Curran argues that RTÉ has dented, rather than lost, the trust of the public. Until we learn why the mistakes were made about Fr Reynolds, it is probably too soon to tell which is the case.