In the final moments of this Wednesday’s Oireachtas Media Committee hearing on the finances of RTÉ , chair of the committee and Fianna Fáil TD Niamh Smyth went around the house for a mini-CV and vibes check from each of the board members who had not been in session before, including deputy chair of RTÉ and editor of The Currency Ian Kehoe, along with Web Summit co-founder Daire Hickey, RTÉ staff representative Robert Shortt, MIT academic Jonathan Ruane, businesswoman Anne O’Leary, playwright Aideen Howard, tech entrepreneur Connor Murphy, media executive David Harvey and UCD lecturer PJ Matthews.

Smyth was concerned that most of them hadn’t gotten a look in during the four-hour hearing and wanted to see how they were feeling about their time on the board. 

One after another, the board seemed to toe the new party line: that things had been bad but now they are good, and if anyone can do the job of turning a financially faltering RTÉ around, it will be new director general Kevin Bakhurst with Siún Ní Raghallaigh, the chair of the board, by his side. 

It’s not clear what Smyth was hoping would come out of this roll call, but hopefully she didn’t expect too much other than a chance to hear the vocal cords of Hickey and Murphy, the only two board members dialling in remotely for the occasion, who had yet to be asked a single question. 

Overall Smyth’s question didn’t bring much of substance to light other than there has been a “sea-change” on the board over the past month in terms of the level of “information and interrogation” as Aideen Howard phrased it. If former chair Moya Doherty was watching on Oireachtas TV, it’s unlikely to have been cosy viewing to have her tenure quite negatively summed up as lacking in a “culture of discussion”, as David Harvey put it. 

As news of the disastrous financial situation RTÉ now finds itself in has filled the news headlines over the past fortnight, Bakhurst tried in his opening statement to direct the Committee towards the future. “We have a choice,” he said. “We can work together to reform and reshape RTÉ for the next 100 years, or we can accept its failure and demise. The latter is something that I, and I believe you, cannot accept.”

It should have been a rousing call to action for a collaborative committee meeting and one which the actual decision makers in cabinet could tune into for instruction, but instead the four hours rolled along in a jagged and disjointed fashion as senators and TDs oscillated between dragging up the dregs of outrage over the payments scandal, and offering improbably solutions to RTÉ’s financial woes like moving the entire operation to Galway airport.

The frustration within the Media Committee of their own purpose, was perhaps best summed up by Senator Shane Cassells who pointed out that the the decisions on the future of funding RTÉ “are going to be made, not in this committee room but between Minister Martin, the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste and Cabinet”.

So in all of the tussling between the past, the future and a suitable clip for social media, what new came out of this outing? 

A legal “dispute” with Tubridy

Easy pickings first: former director general Dee Forbes is still nowhere to be seen and Bakhurst told the committee that he hasn’t spoken to her since the payments scandal blew up. Not referencing Forbes by name but by context, Ni Raghaghallaigh said that she “can’t force people to the table” despite her equal eagerness to get full answers to the same questions that have been rattling around for months now, namely why it was decided to top up Ryan Tubridy’s contractual fees and conceal that decision.

From this, it is possible to decipher that Forbes is likely not cooperating with the remaining Grant Thornton investigation or the McCann FitzGerald report into the Voluntary Redundancy Scheme. But until Forbes comments or more information emerges, we can’t know that for sure. 

Neither was Richard Collins, the current chief financial officer, anywhere to be seen. Bakhurst’s cryptic answer that he respectfully couldn’t say anymore on the CFO’s status than to confirm he was still in employment, or on his future with the organisation, says an awful lot in itself.

In terms of Tubridy, Bakhurst made it clear that he has had no contact with the ex-Late Late Show presenter directly since he called him to tell him the offer of a €170,000 radio contract was being rescinded.

There are clearly ongoing issues between parties, as Bakhurst said it was RTÉ’s view that no money was owed to Tubridy. The ex-presenter was recently seen riding his funemployment red Vespa down a South Dublin road.

RTÉ, in turn, has “no legal tool” to pursue Ryan Tubridy for the €150,000 the state broadcaster paid him for work he didn’t do and will never do, according to Bakhurst. 

Asked about the €150,000 in question, Bakhurst said he believed it was a “moral” issue for Tubridy, to return the money but that there were no “legal tools” in RTÉ’s arsenal to force the issue.  

He said this while the echo of Tubridy telling the Public Accounts Committee that he absolutely would return the money unless Renault wanted him to do six faux Late Late Shows, rang clear around Committee Room 3. 

The presenter and RTÉ also remain at loggerheads over the ending of his contract, with “legal correspondence” exchanged between the two sides since negotiations broke down. “It’s fair to say there’s a dispute over the contract,” Bakhurst said.

Gaping hole and interim funding

At the centre of the day, however, was money, namely how much RTÉ is going to need this year to fill the gaping hole left by licence fee deviants, and how much in interim funding does it need to keep going? 

The broadcaster’s estimated ask is for €50 million – €21 million of that being the projected fall-off in licence fee payments and €34.5 in interim funding – but there were no solutions forthcoming from the politicians as yet. 

Bakhurst told the committee that there is now a freeze in RTÉ on both hiring and discretionary spending. But in terms of voluntary redundancies, which he all but promised to be in the organisation’s future, he said RTÉ “can’t afford” to do them right now. 

Perhaps most worrying for the News and Current affairs teams back in Montrose will be his remark that in the future, RTÉ will need to be a “smaller organisation” and going forward it “will have to look at what programming we do”.

“There is no low-hanging fruit when it comes to cutting costs,” Bakhurst said, adding that “the last thing I want to do is run out of cash”, and have to seek compulsory redundancies.

“There’s been enough blame to go around and the board has to own an element of that blame as well.”

Ian Kehoe 

It was only an hour and a half into the meeting that Oireachtas members seemed to realise they had a full array of RTÉ board members, some of them long-standing directors, in front of their committee for the first time. Fianna Fáil Senator Shane Cassels was first to quiz deputy chair Ian Kehoe in broad terms about “[his] feelings on this, [his] role and the board’s role in this process”.

Kehoe will come to the end of a five-year term on the board on October 8 and has been deputy chair since November 22, 2019. He is also a member of RTÉ’s audit and risk committee.

He said the recent controversies had “portrayed RTÉ in a really bad light, rightly so” but praised the coverage of the story by the state broadcaster’s own journalists as an illustration of the professionalism that “everyone’s really proud” about among board and management members.

“There’s been enough blame to go around and the board has to own an element of that blame as well,” Kehoe said. “But one thing I will say is that, when we learned about this in March, when we first got calls that there may be an issue around two €75,000 invoices, we didn’t back down and we pursued it. And we kept on pursuing it. We put all of that information into the public as quickly and as transparently as we possibly could, knowing – and we all knew – that it would have significant reputational consequences for the organisation.”

Next was Fine Gael TD Brendan Griffin, who was the first – and only – politician to tackle RTÉ directors with an aggressive line of questioning on their own accountability. “I’ve heard plenty of scapegoats and I’ve heard plenty of people thrown under buses but you’re the board, you’re in charge of oversight,” he said. “Did anybody on the board raise the fact that the remuneration committee only met a handful of times and broke its own rules over the last five years? Anybody?” Griffin added, pointing out the pay scandal that has eroded confidence in RTÉ since June was a remuneration issue.

However, he left the question open to the floor, failing to put it on to any of the individual directors in place at the time. It fell to Ní Raghallaigh, who only became chair last November, and legal director Paula Mullooly, who is not a board member, to give a factual summary of the fact that only three Remco meetings took place in four years instead of at least two each year.

It was only later in the meeting that Media Committee Chair Niamh Smyth asked Kehoe directly whether, as he chaired board meetings in January 2020, October 2020 and October 2021 in the absence of then chair Moya Doherty for health reasons, he had raised concerns about the lack of Remco meetings during that period. 

“No, and I regret that,” Kehoe said. Would he do it differently now, Smyth asked? “Of course. And it’s a case of if I knew then what I know,” Kehoe replied. 

He also referred to other issues discussed at board meetings: “A lot of questions were continually asked, be it around financial modelling, about the future strategy, about the advertising makeup, about the investment in digital. And maybe some of the questions weren’t appropriate, maybe we could have asked better questions. But there was a continually inquisitive process ongoing. At times, I felt a level of frustration about the quality of the answers that were coming back.”

Did he express that view, Smyth asked? “I did, continually,” Kehoe said, adding for example that the board did question the executive team on the implementation of the 15 per cent cut to the pay of RTÉ’s 10 highest-paid presenters. “We specifically asked at board level: ‘Has each of the top 10 taken it?’ And the answer came back was yes. Then we didn’t ask the question: ‘Was there top-ups through a tripartite agreement with a commercial partner?’ But there was a period of withholding information that I regret. So, questions were asked, sometimes we didn’t get the answers we required. Sometimes the answers we got were simply incorrect.”

Coming back to Griffin’s questioning, the Kerry TD asked Kehoe about the evaluation of the board, which was only performed as a self-rating exercise and not through external evaluators on a regular basis as mandated by the Code of Practice for the Governance of State Bodies. 

“You gave yourself really high marks,” Griffin said, later adding: “The findings of the board in terms of their own performance averages at four out of five – 80 per cent, these are kind of Saddam Hussein approval ratings.”

“Actually we didn’t,” Kehoe replied. “It raised a number of significant questions about its diversity and inclusion.” On the fact that obligatory external evaluations didn’t take place, he explained that the decision was taken because of Covid-19 restrictions and a period of six or seven months waiting for missing board members to be appointed, but ultimately conceded: “I think it should have happened, deputy, yeah.”

Griffin later concluded his solo run probing the responsibility of board members by making his upcoming TV licence renewal conditional on the performance of Ní Raghallaigh. “I wouldn’t trust you with €160, never mind €160 million. I’d rather go down to Murphy’s Bar in Boolteens and buy a round of drinks.”

RTÉ journalist Robert Shortt, who represents staff on the board of the state broadcaster, took issue with Griffin’s comment: “I think we should take the payment of the licence fee very seriously and I was taken aback by your description of comparing it to buying a round of drinks in a pub,” Shortt said.

“I’ll be renewing my licence fee and I encourage everyone to do it,” Griffin clarified. “But you don’t understand why people don’t want to: Because they have no confidence in you. That’s the problem. It’s your mess and you still don’t get that.” Shortt replied: “I’m perfectly willing to own whatever mistakes we made.”

Land deals, and moving out of Dublin 

The future of RTÉ’s sprawling landbank in Dublin 4 featured several times during the discussion. Galway East Fine Gael TD Ciarán Cannon described it as “one of the most valuable land banks in the country” and speculated: “It is probably worth somewhere in the region of half a billion euro at this point.” He asked whether RTÉ had ever considered moving out of Dublin to another location such as Galway and suggested that the land around Galway city airport could fit “four RTÉs.” 

Bakhurst replied: “Everything is under consideration in terms of the strategy but one of the things we are focusing on is moving more staff and production out of Dublin and we are totally focused on what value we can get from the site. I hope you’re right and it is worth half a billion but we rather suspect it is not. We are getting a professional valuation done on it. We are trying to leverage everything we can.”

A photographer on €240,000 to take photos of Fair City

On Tuesday, the Irish Examiner reported that RTÉ is to spend €240,000 on a photographer to take pictures of its soap opera Fair City over a three-year period. Under the contract the photographer had to take 16 approved still photographs a week. Bakhurst was quizzed about this by Cannon, who described the optics as “horrific” for a station struggling financially. “I am not aware of every single hiring decision in the organisation particularly if they are contract rather than permanent staff,” Bakhurst said. “But I will get to the bottom of it and I will report back on it.” 

When a car allowance is not a car allowance

Sinn Féin TD Imelda Munster used her ten minutes in part to quiz RTÉ on the €4 million spent by the station on various allowances in 2022. Munster said many of these were understandable, such as allowances paid for shift work or long hours. But she said €500,000 was paid to 46 people for being “on-air.” She asked Bakhurst why this allowance existed when being on-air could be considered part of normal work in a television and radio station semi-state. 

“There are far too many allowances in RTÉ,” Bakhurst admitted. He said this type of allowance was to pay some people who moved between on- and off-air. Bakhurst was asked if he knew how many people were receiving multiple allowances. He said he would find out. 

Munster also asked him about whether some of the 61 people who were paid “car allowances” in RTÉ did not even have a driving licence. “There could well be, deputy…I don’t know why they are called car allowances,” Bakhurst said. “It dates back to the 1980s. They are management allowances. That is what they should be called in my view or they should be part of salaries that we declare full stop. You don’t have to have a car and you don’t have to have a licence to get a so-called car allowance,” he admitted.

Bakhurst said he had not asked the 61 people in receipt of car allowances whether they could drive. “The practice has been built up over 40 years of people getting car allowances,” he said. “It explicitly says, as it does in my contract, you do not have to spend this on a car. You can spend it if you want to on a car. Which is why they should not be called that.”  

“It was left to chance before” 

David Harvey on being a director of RTÉ 

David Harvey joined the board of RTÉ in September 2021, with a background in television presenting and production. He is the television producer of the three-part series Confessions of a Crime Boss which is attracting big viewership numbers on RTÉ rival Virgin Media One. The series about crime boss John Gilligan has been criticised by government ministers and family members of the murdered journalist Veronica Guerin. Nobody asked Harvey about this, and he was only asked to significantly contribute once to proceedings. His comments were, however, insightful.

“The information that I felt we received as a board was presented as a matter of course,” he said, remembering when he first joined the board. “It was brought in with no solutions… I found that very troubling from the outset that it was presented on a monthly basis as a fait accompli. I didn’t think there was a culture of discussion or a culture of interrogation. That’s the way I felt.” 

Harvey said he knew there was a new administration coming into RTÉ so he felt: “There was no point shouting into a canyon where I might not be listened to.” Harvey said a recent meeting of RTÉs board about its future strategy was very positive and he expressed confidence in the chair and leadership of RTÉ today. “I think RTÉ has a really good fighting chance provided we get the funding structure right and we know what the product is and the company is going forward.” 

Asked if he felt RTÉ’s board was today receiving the right information, Harvey said he felt it was – and that the board today was asking more questions. “It was left to chance before,” he said.

Ian Kehoe, the editor of The Currency, is on the board of RTÉ. He is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee of the board. He was not involved in the editing of this article nor did he see it prior to publication.

Further reading

Procurement, allowances, taxi vouchers: What a decade of audits tell us about RTÉ