RTÉ EXECUTIVES HAVE lobbied senior Government figures about funding dozens of times in recent years, while making controversial use of three barter accounts and spending hundreds of thousands on voluntary redundancies during that time.
An analysis of returns on the State’s Lobbying Register shows that the broadcaster has contacted successive taoisigh and media ministers, as well as various TDs and secretaries general, more than 50 times about funding since 2016.
The register is a database of information which details when individuals, groups and companies have lobbied government figures about certain issues.
When someone is a lobbyist, returns must be filed by law over the course of three periods each year, and are supposed to contain full details about who carried out the lobbying, how they did so (ie via phone call, email or meeting) and what they lobbied about.
One return shows that RTÉ’s former Director General Dee Forbes and former head of strategy Rory Coveney met with Department of Media Secretary General Katherine Licken to discuss “future funding” on 16 March this year.
That came weeks after Forbes had been informed that auditors had questioned two invoices for €75,000, which turned out to be payments to Ryan Tubridy as part of the underwritten Renault deal.
The return states that the intended outcome of the meeting, as well as another meeting attended by Media Minister Catherine Martin on 13 February, was to “communicate the need for interim funding for RTÉ pending a sustainable funding model” and to “communicate issues and concerns regarding funding of public service broadcasting”.
Similar concerns were raised by Forbes at another six meetings with Licken last year, while former chair of the RTÉ Board Moya Doherty also wrote to then-Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Catherine Martin about the matter last September.
RTÉ lobbied politicians about funding and the need to reform the licence fee on three separate occasions in 2021, when those who were lobbied included then-Tánaiste Leo Varadkar and Martin Fraser, who was at the time secretary general at the Department of An Taoiseach.
In 2020, Forbes lobbied Government figures more than ten times with concerns about funding for the national broadcaster.
Some of this included a request for funding in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, when RTÉ experienced a drop in advertising revenue and expressed concerns about the ability for people to pay their TV licence fees and a consequent impact on the broadcaster’s balance sheet.
In a letter to then-Communications Minister Richard Bruton on 2 April 2020, previously released to The Journal under the Freedom of Information Act, Forbes expressed concern about how RTÉ could function if such losses continued.
“RTÉ cannot sustain these levels of revenue collapse across both its main income streams,” she wrote.
“RTÉ had already been on a significant programme of cost reduction and reform since the beginning of the year as part of its Revised Strategy 2020-2024. Reductions of over 15% have been secured in top talent fees [...]
“We are doing everything we can to manage through these exceptional circumstances and will continue to adapt as circumstances dictate.”
The letter came a short time after RTÉ discussed underwriting the €75,000 Renault deal to Tubridy, with documents from February 2020 released to the Public Accounts Committee last week showing the broadcaster saying that Forbes would provide a letter of guarantee to the presenter about no further cuts to his contract.
Forbes also held six meetings about the future of RTÉ and its funding in 2019, including multiple meetings with Richard Bruton and Martin Fraser.
Lobbying returns also show that Rory Coveney held three meetings with opposition politicians the same year, in which he sought to communicate issues around “RTÉ’s overall finances and strategic challenges”.
RTÉ’s former Chief Financial Officer Breda O’Keeffe also lobbied politicians about funding on three different occasions in 2018.
O’Keeffe surprised Public Accounts Committee members last Thursday when she texted RTÉ’s deputy director general Adrian Lynch (who was appearing before politicians) during the committee, after saying she had nothing further to add to her previous appearance.
In one meeting with officials in the Department of Communications, O’Keeffe called for a reversal of emergency cuts made to RTÉ’s public funding in previous years, while the intended outcome of another meeting was “additional public funding”.
O’Keeffe left the national broadcaster after 17 years in March 2020, when she took a significant voluntary redundancy package.
Last week, new RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst said he would commission an external review into the broadcaster’s voluntary exit schemes from the period 2017 to 2021.
It came after the issue of exit packages was raised at the Public Accounts Committee last Thursday, when RTÉ was asked to investigate the package given to O’Keeffe.
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