Ryan Tubridy and Noel Kelly blame RTÉ for payments saga during hours-long defence

Ryan Tubridy said he had endured a “tortuous”, “chaotic” and “destructive” three weeks during which his name and reputation were “sullied” as he faced questions over the course of nearly seven hours at two Oireachtas committees on Tuesday.

In the committee hearings, Mr Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly mounted a fierce defence of their respective positions.

Mr Tubridy told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC): “I don’t know if any of you have been cancelled before, but you don’t want to be there.” He also claimed there had been a “humanity bypass” in how the story had unfolded.

“I think my name has been desperately sullied. I think my reputation has been sullied. I am deeply upset. I am hurt.”

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The two men faced pushback and scepticism from politicians across the spectrum, however. Labour TD Alan Kelly told them “I don’t buy any of it” when discussing the way in which payments were arranged as part of a Renault commercial agreement.

In his opening statement to both committees, the former presenter of The Late Late Show said he wanted to call out “seven material untruths”.

The first, he said, was the claim that he had not taken a pay cut from RTÉ in 2020. He said he had taken a 20 per cent pay cut.

However, Alan Kelly responded to this, saying: “There was no 20 per cent drop in salary in real terms and to say so has no credibility whatsoever, zero.” The Labour TD was referring to the additional yearly payment of €75,000 which was agreed alongside Mr Tubridy’s main contract and which was in exchange for personal appearances with Renault.

Tubridy said another “untruth” was that he had not asked RTÉ about their underdeclarations of his salary when they released the 2017, 2018 and 2019 earnings.

“At the end of my 2015-2020 contract, my agent advised me that I was entitled to a €120,000 payment that has been variously called a loyalty, end-of contract or exit payment.

“I did not invoice for that payment. I did not pursue the payment and I did not receive any payment. But because of how RTÉ reported that decision in their accounts, the narrative of the last three weeks has been that not only did I take this payment but that I somehow contrived to hide it. I had nothing to hide.”

One of the key aspects of the unfolding saga has been around the fact that two of the €75,000 payments, as part of the Renault deal, were labelled as “consultancy fees” and were paid for via the RTÉ barter account in the UK.

Noel Kelly told the PAC it was the idea of RTÉ's former commercial director Geraldine O’Leary to label invoices for payments due to Tubridy as “consultancy fees”.

Mr Kelly said they were acting under instruction from RTÉ “at all times”. Politicians on both committees were critical of this defence.

Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy described this as the “Nuremberg defence” of just following orders.

Fine Gael TD Alan Dillon asked if Noel Kelly had colluded in a “falsehood of concealment” by labelling the invoices as consultancy fees. Mr Kelly said “We had no benefit in seeking to suppress” any payments.

“These invoices were as instructed. We were just following process,” he said.

Another key issue is around RTÉ's decision to underwrite the Renault deal, meaning RTÉ would have to step in and pay the money to Tubridy if the commercial company could not. Mr Kelly said he had asked for the deal to be underwritten because the relationship with the sponsor was “with RTÉ, it’s not with us,” adding that he had wanted it underwritten in case the sponsor had changed.

On this issue, a booklet of documentation was provided to both committees which contained details of an email from 2020 which appears to directly contradict previous evidence around the underwriting of the deal.

Last week, the organisation’s former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe said: “My recollection is that Mr Tubridy’s agent requested that the commercial agreement be underwritten by RTÉ and this was refused. This continued to be my position and, as far as I am aware, that of the director general, head of content and the RTÉ solicitor, up to the date of my departure from RTÉ in March 2020.”

Mr Kelly presented, on Tuesday, a new email to the committees.

“On this page you will see an email which she sent to my office dated the 20th of February 2020. It is copied to another member of the executive board, the then director general and RTÉ's solicitor.”

He said that on the last paragraph, “Ms O’Keeffe – on behalf of RTÉ – states explicitly that ‘we can provide you with a side letter to underwrite this fee for the duration on of the contract’.”

Mr Kelly added: “To our surprise, Ms O’Keeffe told the committee last week that when she left RTÉ in March there was no support to provide that type of guarantee and no such guarantee was on offer. But she had written to us making exactly that offer a month earlier.”

Tubridy said: “Everyone in RTÉ who needed to know, knew.”

The presenter also said his decision to step down from The Late Late Show had not been driven in any way by concerns raised by auditors. He said he stepped down because “I ran out of gas.”

He also said he wanted to get back on radio as soon as possible but later told the media committee: “I could be out of a job by Friday.”

Tubridy was also asked about the Toy Show the Musical project, which lost €2.2 million in its first year. He said given the nature of his job, he did not get involved. “Any time I was asked, I always wished them well.”

Tubridy said he should have called out his published earnings figures when they were released in 2021, and he saw that they were wrong. “So yeah, I’m not without blame in that regard.”

But he also rounded on RTÉ for how they handled the release of the information around the Grant Thornton report three weeks ago.

“We were given approximately 30 minutes’ warning from RTÉ to say this bomb is about to be let out. We looked at it and said, you can’t. You are putting out this information so much of which we can counter and clarify for you. We said, this Grant Thornton report said Ryan Tubridy did nothing wrong. We said you’ve got to include that … and they said no.”

What followed, Tubridy said, was a “mauling of sorts, for three weeks”. Separately, Tubridy also revealed that six roadshow appearances are outstanding on the Renault deal. If he doesn’t deliver them, he has committed to paying them back.