Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ abandoned the public interest during Covid and capitulated to Tubridy’s tone-deaf demands

Let’s go back for a moment to late 2021 and early 2022. That’s when Ryan Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly, was pressing RTÉ's director general, Dee Forbes, to come up with €150,000 for his client.

Tubridy, like everyone else, was suffering the consequences of the Covid pandemic. His sponsors, Renault, had pulled out of a deal for personal appearances because all such events had been cancelled. They were not going to pay him the €75,000 a year he was expecting as a top-up to his officially declared salary of €466,250 for 2020 and €440,000 for 2021.

Kelly was pushing Forbes to step in and honour a ridiculous commitment that RTÉ had made: that if Renault did not pay Tubridy, the public broadcaster would stump up the cash instead. The agent, and presumably his client, were getting impatient at RTÉ's failure to compensate its highest-paid presenter for the costs to him of a deadly public health crisis.

Here’s a little bit of context for this period in the Irish public service.

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[ RTÉ pay crisis: Inquiries into hidden payments to Ryan Tubridy face pushback from Forbes ]

At the same time as Forbes was meeting Kelly in April 2022 and setting in train the secret payments that would cost RTÉ – and thus the Irish public – €230,760, thousands of other people were also waiting for their money.

Frontline healthcare workers, who had gone in every day to deal with the sick, the dying and the dead, at risk to their own lives and health – student nurses and midwives, Army personnel deployed to testing and vaccination centres, paramedics, hospice staff and people working in disability services – had yet to receive a promised bonus payment.

This bonus was the State’s thank you card for what healthcare workers had done during the worst days of the pandemic. How much was it? All told, €1,000.

At the height of the pandemic, student nurses and midwives who were sent in to deal with some of the most terrible and distressing conditions in hospitals and nursing homes were given a special payment to recognise their heroism. How much was that? One hundred euro a week.

These fourth-year student nurses were being paid, during their hospital placements, €22,000 a year – considerably less than a third of Tubridy’s annual top-up.

There’s another relevant comparison from this period: the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, which was paid by the State to people who lost their jobs because of the Covid lockdowns. The rate varied from €203 to €350 a week.

Thus, one arm of the State was paying Tubridy €1,442 a week to make up for income he lost because of the pandemic. Another part of the State was paying everyone else who lost income for the same reasons at most a quarter of that.

And, of course, those other workers did not have a public income of half a million euro to cushion them from Covid-related losses. They needed the money to survive – Tubridy most certainly did not.

These comparative figures help to clarify what was at stake here – not just €230,760 of public money but the moral authority of the public broadcaster.

It seems from what we know so far that Tubridy did have a legal entitlement to his two annual top-up payments of €75,000. This in itself is extraordinary, but it does seem that RTÉ had agreed that, if Renault pulled out of the deal, it would stump up the money instead.

[ Today’s Ryan Tubridy Show is about to begin. Then a deathly silence fills the airwaves ]

It’s also fair to say that agents are paid to have brass necks. It is their job to make demands that their clients, face to face, would be ashamed to broach. Kelly was certainly doing that for Tubridy.

But what about the other side of the negotiating table? Could Forbes and her colleagues not see that whatever about the legal case for paying off Tubridy, there was no moral case whatsoever – indeed, that there was a moral imperative not do so.

As a public institution, RTÉ has an overarching obligation to the public interest. Everything it does has to withstand a basic test: is this compatible with the public good?

The public good in the pandemic was all about solidarity. It was the feeling that we were all in it together and that we would and should make sacrifices for each other.

If the payments were too shameful to have Tubridy’s name on the invoices, they were also too shameful to be agreed to in the first place

How many seconds would you have to think about whether, in the context of all the pain of the pandemic, it was okay for a State body to spend more than a quarter of a million euro to compensate one very rich employee because his celebrity guest appearances for a car company had been made impossible by the virus?

How hard was it to weigh Tubridy’s demand for €150,000 against the State’s benchmarks of €1,000 for frontline healthcare workers or €100 a week for young student nurses to care for people dying in distress with no families to comfort them?

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And if it came to playing hardball, Forbes and her colleagues had a pretty hard one of their own: public outrage. Imagine if, with the pandemic still ripping through people’s lives, RTÉ had let it be known that one of its stars was looking for more Covid-related compo than it would take to pay eight student nurses for a year of frontline service?

In fact, all the evidence suggests that the RTÉ executive understood that potential for public anger all too well. Why else did it hide these payments from the Government and the public? Why did it route them through three different companies and disguise them as fees for non-existent “consultancy services”?

[ Ryan Tubridy played the passive actor but as RTÉ’s highest earner, he has responsibilities ]

If the payments were too shameful to have Tubridy’s name on the invoices, they were also too shameful to be agreed to in the first place. So, what we have to understand is why Forbes did not do the obvious thing and tell Kelly to tell his client to go take a running jump at himself. And that, if he wanted to sue for his Renault money, to go right ahead and explain in court why his Covid-related suffering was worth so much more than that of a nurse, a doctor or a nursing home carer.

That, instead, RTÉ abandoned the public interest in solidarity and sacrifice and capitulated to Tubridy’s tone-deaf demands suggests a much deeper malaise. It shows how, in RTÉ's hybrid of public and commercial funding, the latter has corroded the values of the former.

RTÉ is supposed to serve its audience as citizens, but it’s also obliged to deliver them to advertisers as consumers. This sorry episode shows how far the crassness of consumer culture has eroded the instincts of good citizenship.

The urgent lesson is that, if we want a State broadcaster for a republican democracy, we should pay for it through our taxes – and demand in return what the vast majority of those who work in RTÉ want to deliver. That is a public service broadcaster where the “service” is what is delivered to citizens and not what is expected by entitled celebs.

[ Fintan O’Toole: Ryan Tubridy chose silence instead of speaking out. An extended silence should follow ]