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LAST UPDATE | 19 May
RTÉ BOSSES HAVE arrived for a meeting with the communications minister amid fresh scrutiny of its financial management.
Station director-general Kevin Bakhurst, deputy director-general Adrian Lynch, and board chairman Terence O’Rourke arrived together for the meeting with Minister Patrick O’Donovan and his officials in Dublin this evening.
The national broadcaster was forced to revise its list of top-paid presenters for 2024 last week after RTÉ discovered that Derek Mooney had been omitted. He should have been listed as the eighth highest-paid presenter at the broadcaster.
It was also revealed last week that a combined €97,000 was paid to Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy after the duo stopped working for the broadcaster towards the end of last year. This move was defended by Bakhurst.
This afternoon cabinet approved plans to bring RTÉ’s finances under the control of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG).
The move comes as part of the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill, which aims to strengthen transparency, accountability and governance in RTÉ and TG4 while also widening support for public service content across the wider media sector.
The bill also establishes a new statutory framework for public service content and ensures at least 25% of RTÉ’s annual funding will be used for independent programmes.
The bill also ensures that any European works levy (‘Netflix levy’)can only be imposed by Coimisiún na Meán with ministerial direction and provides them with more information gathering powers for their work around online safety.
Speaking on his way into cabinet this morning, O’Donovan said:
We’ve been down this road before, and here we are again.
He said RTÉ staff are “very aggrieved” and said he had received anonymous correspondence from staff within the organisation.
“There is a lot of hurt in the organisation because people thought this is the end of it, and clearly it is not.”
He said there cannot be a “vacuum” in the company and said they cannot have a “relationship built on revelation”.
Tánaiste Simon Harris told reporters on his way into cabinet that fairness and transparency were needed to ensure “we don’t have Groundhog Day”.
“I think there’s a lot of hard work and decent people in RTÉ who will feel let down by this latest set of revelations,” he said.
“I don’t want to push to personalise it to anyone, because I think that serves no purpose, but it’s beginning to look like there’s a little bit of an upstairs-downstairs situation going on in RTÉ, that certain producers can be over here, and that’s not fair. It’s not fair in any organisation.
“So, there’s a fairness issue here, there’s a transparency issue here, and then there’s just an accuracy issue here, fairness, transparency and accuracy. And we need all three of them to ensure we don’t have Groundhog Day.”
He added: “I just think, as people turned on their radio or their television over the weekend – forget politics – I just think most Irish people are like ‘here we go again’.”
The Comptroller and Auditor General currently audits the finances of almost 300 public bodies, excluding local authorities and commercial semi-State bodies like RTÉ.
Subject to approval by the Oireachtas, the Bill will see the C&AG become the auditor of RTÉ’s accounts from the broadcaster’s 2026 figures onwards.
Calls for such a change first began during the protracted crisis surrounding RTÉ governance following the Ryan Tubridy payment scandal, when then chairperson of the RTÉ board, Siún Ní Raghallaigh, recommended that RTÉ should be audited by the C&AG.
However, legislative change was required to expand its remit.
It is understood that O’Donovan planned to bring this bill to cabinet this week before the latest payment controversy with RTÉ was revealed.
With reporting from Jane Moore and Press Association
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