Pat Leahy: Flip-flops are the least of RTÉ’s problems

The Oireachtas media committee and the Public Accounts Committee have a busy few weeks ahead of them as they seek to untangle the finances of the RTÉ barter account(s), the pay and perks of its management and presenters and the extent of and responsibility for the sustained deceit engaged in by RTÉ about its top star’s pay.

Much entertainment surely awaits, along with much despair and embarrassment of everyone in RTÉ – and much, much outrage from politicians and public alike. The extent to which the public seems genuinely appalled at how RTÉ conducted itself is becoming apparent – both anecdotally (and remember, politicians live by sorting the quality of their anecdotal evidence) and in a slew of poll data last weekend.

Wednesday’s highlights included €5,000 flip-flops, balloons, concert tickets, breakfasts, lunches and dinners, a musical flop, cars loaned and so on and so on.

You can be sure there is plenty more where that came from, and it’s not very hard to imagine what it’s going to look like when it does come out. Leave aside the apparently lavish scale of the spending if you can (the flip-flops, for example, are said by those in the know to be at the very top end of flip-flop design and quality) and remember that corporate entertainment is very much part of the advertising and marketing world. But the problem for RTÉ is now all this will be seen in the context of the Tubridy scandal and the public perception of a golden circle at the station. In other words, the coming weeks are likely to compound the damage of the last two.

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This is beginning to alarm some people in the Government, who see a financial crunch for the broadcaster coming down the line, and an organisation in no fit state to take difficult and far-reaching decisions about what it does in the future.

Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe gave voice to this a few days ago when he said: “We’re going to need an RTÉ at the end of this.”

Donohoe is one of a group in government who are supporters of public-service broadcasting but often privately critical of the station. He was one of the fiercest opponents of the bid by RTÉ for more State support last year. There are several others who share his views. There are some outright critics of the station in the Government; and there are supporters too. Catherine Martin, the relevant Minister, is reckoned by most to be one. Tánaiste Micheál Martin is usually open to looking favourably on RTÉ’s frequent requests, insiders say.

But what all fear now is the state of RTÉ once this phase of the scandal abates. It will surely damage commercial revenues. Additional State funding is a political impossibility right now. And that means only one thing: RTÉ is facing a financial crisis in the near future. And what happens then?

Conscious of the fact that the commercial realities will move more quickly than the political ones, some people in the Government are already trying to figure out the way out of this. Two of them spoke privately to The Irish Times yesterday afternoon; both say it will involve a smaller RTÉ, doing a narrower range of things, more clearly identifiable as public-service broadcasting.

Deciding how to do that is going to be a very painful process for the station; changes will be imposed on an angry workforce, not by the Government or management decree but by financial reality. It is also likely that it will be under substantially new leadership. Tough and all as these past few weeks have been for RTÉ and its staff, the hard times are by no means over. In fact, they’re only beginning.