Ten new things we’ve learned: Blistering opening statements from Ryan Tubridy and Noel Kelly

A dossier of documents and two blistering opening statements from Ryan Tubridy and his agent, Noel Kelly, gave way to the first of two marathon sessions on the star’s pay. After yet another day of intense action at the Oireachtas committees, what have we learned?

1. The gap between RTÉ and Ryan Tubridy is now a chasm

The presenter took aim at RTÉ in his first statement of this saga, some three weeks ago now, effectively blaming it for errors in presenting his earnings. On Tuesday, Tubridy charged RTÉ with creating a “fog of confusion over what I was paid and when I was paid, what I knew, and when I knew”.

“Full transparency and disclosure on RTÉ's part would have avoided this,” he says, going on to outline seven “material untruths”, running from the claim he didn’t take a pay cut in 2020, or that it had any bearing on his decision to retire from The Late Late Show.

Yesterday, new RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst issued a lukewarm response to the idea of Tubridy returning to the broadcaster: “We’ll have to see how events this week go.”

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Today, Tubridy rounded on the broadcaster, criticising it on multiple occasions – not least outlining his particular upset and disappointment “about the decision and framing of the RTÉ statement of June 22nd which inextricably linked my name to this whole fiasco”. He told the committee that he had 30 minutes notice of the statement, and that changes were requested - specifically a reference to how he had not been found to have acted wrongly - were not incorporated. He said he has become “the face of a national scandal; accused of being complicit, deceitful and dishonest”, with the RTÉ statement “very unhelpful in this regard”. “The full TRUTH” was concealed, he said, in what “has been my darkest hour both professionally and personally”. Kelly later said he was washing his hands of the controversy, saying it was “an RTÉ issue” completely.

[ Watch live: Ryan Tubridy says ‘I have become the face of a national scandal’ ]

2. Tubridy on the attack over underwriting

A key part of this whole controversy has been the RTÉ contention that only Dee Forbes, the former director general, knew the full extent of the deal between Renault, RTÉ and Tubridy which saw his earnings underwritten by the broadcaster. Within that, RTÉ has said the proposal that RTÉ backstop the €75,000 fee agreed for personal appearances with Renault was agreed by Forbes on a Zoom call in May 2020. Before that, RTÉ executives past and present – including former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe have said the underwriting proposal was resisted by the station.

However, an email from O’Keeffe disclosed by Tubridy’s team, copying in Forbes and director of content Jim Jennings, outlines that RTÉ are willing to “provide you with a side letter to underwrite this fee for the duration of the contract”. Kelly draws extra attention to this in his opening statement, calling it “perhaps the most shocking revelation”, and stating the idea there was strong pushback against the underwriting is “incorrect”. He also says he wrote to RTÉ highlighting this four days before their last media committee appearance.

RTÉ has released a statement doubling down on its position and saying the email from O’Keeffe wasn’t a binding commitment. It’s likely there will be calls for further clarity from O’Keeffe, and from Acting Deputy DG Adrian Lynch, who has consistently pointed to the verbal agreement on the Zoom call as the key point when it comes to underwriting the deal. RTÉ will also doubtless be asked why it did not release this email as part of two document dumps it has passed to committees so far.

The key issue facing RTÉ is that even if the email doesn’t necessarily suggest the existence of a contractual relationship - it does seem to undermine the broadcaster’s previous focus on significant internal push back against the idea, until it supposedly went through on the nod from Forbes. “Other people knew bar Dee Forbes, that’s the whole point,” Kelly told the PAC. He later said he did not think it was plausible that Forbes was the only person in RTÉ with knowledge of the arrangement she made with Mr Kelly.

[ I was a writer on Toy Show the Musical. It has been a weird time ]

3. Tubridy and Kelly accuse RTÉ of getting its sums wrong

In a detailed statement, Kelly said that the broadcaster has under-declared payments made to Tubridy for 2017, 2018 and 2019 when it published figures for these years in January 2021. “This issue has caused a lot of distress. It’s entirely a mess of RTÉ's own making,” he told the committee. He says that when RTÉ published the figures it contradicted previous correspondence with Tubridy and Kelly and “made false or incorrect declarations about these same figures”.

This relates to a bonus Tubridy was due at the end of his 2015 contract, of €120,000. Kelly says it was agreed he was not going to raise an invoice for the payment, and claims that RTÉ then proposed to lower payments already made to the presenter in 2017, 2018 and 2019. “We argued against that,” he says, claiming RTÉ accepted their points. “For some reason however, it looks like their confused thinking returned and they published the wrong figures in January 2021 effectively causing huge reputation (sic) damage to Ryan in the process.”

[ Fintan O’Toole: RTÉ bureaucrats fantasised they could turn themselves into Broadway impresarios ]

Tubridy says that because of how RTÉ reported that decision, a narrative has emerged that “not only did I take this payment but that somehow I contrived to hide it”.

Kelly went on to argue that RTÉ's original figures for 2020 and 2021, published in February of this year, were correct, only for the broadcaster to overstate the figures it paid Tubridy in these years, understate them for 2022, in a revision to his payments published last month.

It is a tangled and complicated web, seemingly compounded by the different views of the appropriate accounting treatment of €75,000 payments made to Tubridy by RTÉ as part of the underwriting agreement.

4. Invoicing conflict

Another key point of controversy has been the labelling of invoices paid by RTÉ from its barter account, and destined for Tubridy through Kelly as “consultancy fees”. Kelly was again on the attack, outlining that for the first payment, Tubridy’s team were told to invoice Renault. He claimed that he was issued with “new instructions”, including an email chain involving former commercial director Geraldine O’Leary that a barter company, Astus, be invoiced and that no individual’s name be put on the invoice.

He goes on to claim that he and Tubridy had no reason to think Astus was linked to RTÉ or was acting on its behalf, or that it might be making the payments on behalf of the broadcaster, or that they were linked to RTÉ underwriting the Renault contract.

“RTÉ never said that to us. Astus never said that to us. Renault never said that to us,” he told the committee.

“At the time we had no reason to suspect that RTÉ might be trying to hide payments to Ryan. I am still shocked that was their intention,” Mr Kelly said.

5. Claim that RTÉ prompted ‘consultancy fees’ label

A key moment in exchanges at PAC came when Kelly claimed to Sinn Féin’s John Brady it was Geraldine O’Leary, the former RTÉ head of commercial, who said the invoices should be made out as “consultancy fees” - which they weren’t. O’Leary has previously said she could not remember who first suggested this, but that it may well have been a conversation “with me and the Director General”.

Tubridy also said he would be willing to repay the €150,000 he has been given for work not yet undertaken - which means ultimately, it would go back to RTÉ.

6. ‘Sullied’ reputation

Both Tubridy and Kelly have expounded on the impact the crisis has had on them with the presenter emphasising that his name has been “sullied”. He said that he is “not looking for sympathy or a violin”, while Kelly said there has been “such horrendous, horrendous reporting” on the topic. Kelly also emphasised that they sought to have changes made to RTÉ's statement of the 22nd of June, which were not made - everything the two men are arguing frames them as being on the receiving end of events, which is the thrust of their statements this morning as well. Tubridy repeatedly referenced the impact of the scandal on him personally, including twice referencing being “cancelled” and saying he is in a “state”, with a “mauling of sorts” being handed his way by the media.

7. Separate arrangements

Tubridy and Kelly have been emphatic that there was no relationship between the commercial deal with Renault and the diminishing fees being paid to Tubridy by RTÉ. Kelly, who has been very much to the fore today in defending and characterising the negotiations with RTÉ, was adamant that the deal with Renault was not to offset a cut in Tubridy’s fee.

Tubridy’s defence is essentially that the arrangements move in parallel, but were distinct. That has been questioned intently by deputies. Tubridy conceded to Waterford Green TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh that he “understand(s) the room for perception issues”.

It also emerged that Tubridy has still to complete six roadshows for Renault mandated under the original agreement, suggesting that the payments were completed for work that had not been done - and still in large part remains undone. According to Kelly, when he was submitting invoices to Astus, the barter company, he presumed that Renault was the one paying them out, with Tubridy also of the view that it was the carmaker paying him. Kelly conceded the sourcing of commercial income by RTÉ for his clients would be “an exception” and was not the norm. Tubridy later said the arrangement was “unorthodox” and it certainly seems to have been unprecedented. Kelly claimed the deal involving Renault was “constructed by RTÉ”.

8. The Nuremberg Defence

Time and again, Kelly has defended himself and Tubridy regarding the unusual invoicing arrangements saying they were acting on instruction from RTÉ at all times, especially when asked why he didn’t raise queries about being given what he says were instructions to leave names off invoices and to pay an unknown company, and why the invoices were issued by different companies controlled by Kelly in different years. In the round, there was deep skepticism among committee members about the picture they were being presented with. “None of this is credible,” Labour’s Alan Kelly told Noel Kelly, who had previously told Fine Gael’s Alan Dillon that the whole blame for the fiasco should be apportioned to RTÉ. The Mayo TD tightly focused on whether Kelly had colluded in a falsehood, who said he and his company were “following process” while the “lack of credibiltiy is on RTÉ's side”. Tubridy backed his agent: “I believe the person sitting to my left,” he told the committee.

As the afternoon wore on, patience wore thin. “Following instructions... it’s called the Nuremberg defence,” quipped Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy. This was a view repeated by many TDs across the afternoon, with Galway East TD Ciarán Cannon saying a false invoice was processed. When Kelly rejected this, Cannon shot back: “You’ve been touting that line all day long,” adding that it was not credibly to say “RTÉ told me to do it”.

9. Leaving the Late Late

Almost every PAC member tested the idea that the impending controversy had nothing to do with Tubridy’s decision to step down from the station’s most iconic show. Tubridy says he will keep asserting this “until the last dog barks”, with both saying they only learned of the investigation in May, months after Tubridy decided to step down and weeks after he publicly announced it. Given the fact that it was known at senior levels that Deloitte had queried the transactions before Tubridy stood down, RTÉ acting deputy director general Adrian Lynch had said it was “possible” the host could have known. Both Kelly and Tubridy repeatedly dismissed this, the presenter saying Lynch is “entitled to his conjecture”. The presenter said he only really became “engaged” in the story when RTÉ issued their statement on 22nd June - which he has not been on air since. He said if information hand’t been “rushed” out, then “99 per cent of this would not have been an issue”

10. Returning to RTÉ

It seems extraordinary given the clear anger towards the broadcaster from Kelly and Tubridy, but the former Late Late Show host said he still sees his future in Montrose, notwithstanding that he still has “beef with some people in there”. Tubridy confirmed he is still being paid by RTÉ on the basis of his radio fee - but twice said he could be out of a job by Friday, saying it is “touch and go from my understanding” as to whether he keeps his job. He said that in the future, he would be happy to publish any contract he has with RTÉ.