Miriam Lord: TDs can scarcely describe their shock at RTÉ but try their utmost

In an impressive display of discipline, TDs returned from a weekend of wall-to-wall RTÉ in their constituencies and managed to get through an entire Leaders’ Questions and the following free-for-all session without a single mention of the national broadcaster.

You see, they can do it when they want to.

Minds may have been elsewhere. The annual Summer Economic Statement was due later on Tuesday afternoon, for example.

Oh, wait.

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With the Dáil into its penultimate week before the long summer recess the House scheduled, by popular demand, a 3½-hour debate into RTÉ’s payments-junkets-goodybags-and-free-bus-from-Drumcondra scandal.

Rarely, in the patchy history of enthusiastic Dáil speechifying, have TDs been so eager to get stuck in. Lesser spotted deputies, those mute swans of parliamentary discourse, sashayed into the chamber and spouted with relish.

In an unusual mass mobilisation from Leinster House and Government Buildings, the country’s politicians united in the common cause of going through the powers-that-be in RTÉ for a short cut.

And with the broadcaster’s executive board already shipping heavy losses across the media and in Oireachtas committee rooms, line-Minister Catherine Martin launched two major investigations into the Donnybrook regime and followed up by sending a forensic accountant over the top for a deep dive into the books.

At the same time, media committee chair Niamh Smyth was announcing the line-up she expects to see back in Leinster House on Wednesday for a roasting to compliment the grilling they got last week.

A document dump was demanded by close of business.

Meanwhile, the Public Accounts Committee girded its loins in advance of a second confrontation by also demanding a full information drop. The PAC wants to know as much as possible before summoning the suits again, possibly next week.

[ RTÉ used barter accounts to cover €1.6m entertainment and hospitality bill ]

[ RTÉ gives dozens of documents to Oireachtas committee ]

If there was as much as an overspend on Coconut Creams in the Green Room, then they want to know about it.

And if that wasn’t enough pressure, TDs were queuing up for the chance to fire off more missiles when the parliamentary decks were cleared after Taoiseach’s Questions.

Sundry other issues, such as the housing crisis and problems in the health service, were raised in the interim, but there was a sense of marking time about proceedings.

Pearse Doherty, standing in for Mary Lou McDonald, concentrated on the expected Summer Economic Statement during an uncharacteristically subdued contribution. But he was in a difficult position – he couldn’t tear strips off a statement yet to be published.

“You are still failing to get the fundamentals right,” he told Leo Varadkar, who replied by telling Pearse that our fundamentals would be through the floor if Government had followed the advice of Sinn Féin.

Never mind the quality, feel the budget surplus, is his answer to everything.

He promised a substantial tax package and an even bigger public spending programme in October.

It will make no difference unless there is a change of direction and a change of delivery, retorted Deputy Doherty.

Labour leader Ivana Bacik agreed. Watching homelessness figures rise every month alongside a booming budget surplus is “appalling”.

As always, the Taoiseach listed his government’s track record in providing new homes. “Of course we have to do more,” he conceded, but “we are lifting people out of homelessness all the time”.

When the new figures emerge, “it is not the same people”.

As mitigating arguments go, Leo might have to work on that one.

Not that it or he mattered, when the place was transfixed by the shocking showbiz scandal still unspooling in Dublin 4.

Minister Catherine Martin set the ball rolling. No stone will be left unturned in the government’s determination to “address the totality” of the carry-on in Donnybrook.

Sinn Féin fielded four speakers, divvying up their time for maximum candidate exposure, to reply to the Minister. Speakers went out in pairs thereafter to thrash the RTÉ management.

Imelda Munster set the tone. The executive board is “rotten to the core,” she declared, struck by the “arrogance and self-importance” and its “rotten insider culture”.

Along with colleagues Brian Stanley, Johnny Brady and Paul Donnelly, Sinn Féin raged about “fat cats at the top of RTÉ living their best life” with their “cock-and-bull stories” and their “cosy consensus and insider culture”.

Only the tip of the iceberg, surmised Stanley, the PAC chairman, who told of a mother from Tullamore who had been saving €4 stamps for her TV licence only to be wrongly arrested while the RTÉ suits were living high on the hog.

“Hauled off to the ‘Joy,” he quivered.

They could scarcely describe their shock, but tried their utmost.

Fianna Fáil’s John McGuinness, a former PAC chair, said they will have to do something “extraordinary” to save RTÉ.

He was doubly outraged. First, over the payments scandal and, second, over the allocation of a mere four minutes speaking time to backbenchers on this important topic.

“Disgrace,” he fumed.

Sinn Féin’s Ruari O’Murchu told of a sick mother of five who was threatened with jail for non-payment of her licence when guests on an RTÉ junket were treated to a free “bus from Drumcondra to Croke Park, my God!”

An old lady told Fianna Fáil’s Jennifer Murnane O’Connor she had lost trust in RTÉ. “As a granny, I felt it very hard when I heard those stories,” she told the TD for Carlow Kilkenny over the weekend.

On and on they went, speaker after speaker, retelling the detail that has been horrifying them since the end of last week.

That complimentary hospitality bus laid on by the corporates for their corporate clients from a restaurant in Drumcondra to a U2 concert in Croke Park seemed to particularly rile TDs.

He pointed out that if the aforementioned vehicle had turned right instead of left, it would have taken its passengers up to the Dóchas Prison.

As 6pm approached, Sinn Féin’s Thomas Gould was so incensed by this “kick in the teeth for the workers” and by GAAGO showing all the good hurling matches that he remembered the “important words” spoken by Bosco.

“Knock, Knock. Open wide. See what’s on the other side.”

Surely, the chamber had reached peak Montrose madness.

But no. Fianna Fáil’s James O’Connor significantly raised the ante while repeatedly claiming he was “sickened”.

He couldn’t get over the commercial arm of RTÉ spending €275,000 on junkets. (A jolly involving “golf and drink and goody bags” in the K Club had been introduced into the mix earlier on).

“Can anyone imagine what would happen here? The place would be burnt down,” he wailed.

As for the junket to Japan for the rugby: If anyone in Leinster House did that, “we’d be rightly lynched,” he thundered before adding: “I mean that metaphorically, Ceann Comhairle.”

He was on a roll. “There was no barter account. It was a banter account. A Las Vegas culture within the organisation of RTÉ.”

“I understand more might come out,” said Fianna Fáil’s Pádraig O’Sullivan.

“Catastrophic,” cried Independent TD Verona Murphy.

To underline how everyone has lost the plot, independent Catherine Collins found herself in agreement with Mattie McGrath when he said the Dáil should have been spending some of the time devoted to RTÉ debating far more serious issues.

But it’s the only show in town.