RTE’s finances hit a variety of bum notes

WHEN the report into Toy Show The Musical emerged last week, bringing yet more astonishing revelations about corporate governance in RTÉ, some social media wits wondered when we might expect to see Toy Show The Musical: The Musical.

There’s definitely the makings of a fascinating behind-the-scenes drama in the shenanigans that went on around that doomed production, even if it might owe more to magic realism than musical theatre.

We learned last week, for example, that even if it had been a sold-out hit, with every one of the 90,000 tickets being snapped up, it still wouldn’t have broken even. They thought they had another Riverdance on their hands and instead it turned out to be another Raise The Titanic – the expensive 1979 movie flop whose producer, Lew Grade, famously said: ‘It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.’

Suckers

The difference, of course, is that the producers of Toy Show The Musical were never going to be the ones striking the financial iceberg. The poor suckers in the boiler room, shovelling in their licence fee fuel to keep the disaster going full steam ahead, were always going to take the hit.

The project was never formally signed off by the board, in a clear breach of its obligations, and the board’s audit committee was given an ‘overstated’ figure for sponsorship of the show. They were told that €120,000 had been raised in sponsorship revenue, when the true figure was just a measly €45,000. And, as now appears to have been a fairly typical attitude to public monies right across the station, there was no proper interrogation of the project’s financing or its prospects for success.

‘Not in line with generally accepted accounting practices,’ was the dry conclusion in the Grant Thornton report. Which is another way of saying the sums weren’t done on the back of an envelope, nor even the back of a stamp – they weren’t done at all.

Following yesterday’s release of the station’s top ten earners’ list, there’s understandable focus on the eye-watering sums paid out in circumstances where the claim that the top stars were irreplaceable, and would be snapped up by rival broadcasters if they were asked to take a cut, rings a tad hollow. Ryan Tubridy was the station’s biggest name and even he was prepared to take a significant cut – €170,000 down from €515,000 in 2022 – before heading off to seek his fortune across the water. But a more revelatory list, perhaps, would be the top 100 earners in the station, which seems to be over-supplied with middle-management in six-figure-salaried duplicate roles. At least we can see what the top earners, all accomplished broadcasters, are doing to earn their keep.

But this is just one of the elements of the saga still playing out. For example, the treatment of up to 500 lowly contract workers, misclassified as self-employed when they were actually staff members for all intents and purposes, has yet to be resolved.

There were, it seems, three different ‘castes’ within the broadcaster: the elite ‘talent’, the equally well-paid and largely anonymous management figures, and the humble worker bees who kept the show on the road but were strung along for years on cheap contracts, breadcrumbed with the ‘prestige’ of an RTÉ job, to deprive them of all the benefits of a staff position.

If it turns out that hundreds of workers were kept on bogus ‘selfemployed’ contracts, missing out on sick leave, maternity leave, holiday pay and pension contributions, there will be massive compensation implications for the national broadcaster.

And the report into the station’s ‘voluntary exit schemes’ will make for interesting reading, whenever it materialises. Kevin Bakhurst ordered the investigation last August, and sought delivery of the report by late September, but here we are in late January 2024 and we’re still waiting to find out whether RTÉ broke the law in paying out ‘goodbye money’ to top executives.

Legally, exit packages should only be made available where the recipient’s job is being axed, so questions arose when it emerged that the station’s former chief financial officer, Breda O’Keeffe, had availed of the scheme.

Yet her role had not been discontinued – in fact, a new chief financial officer was appointed, and her exit package was not signed off by the full executive team.

Urgency

Not surprisingly, the people whose deals are being reviewed have ‘lawyered-up’ and now RTÉ says that, ‘regrettably’, it cannot say when the report will be finished. Yet they must have foreseen legal implications and factored that into their projections for the report’s timings, and this complete lack of urgency or momentum is, again, in keeping with the station’s handling of this entire debacle: they still don’t get it.

In broad terms, though, none of these enquiries will tell us anything we haven’t already worked out for ourselves – that the top brass in RTÉ treated the licencepaying public with total contempt, and showed little regard for the money collected, on pain of criminal prosecution, from ordinary householders to run the station.

They flung it around like snuff at a wake, as the saying goes, and felt no responsibility to manage it, to disburse it fairly and to get value for it as any private business would do. More than six months on, we’re still a long way from a full picture of the governance culture within the national broadcaster. And, as Siún Ní Raghallaigh indicated last week, we can forget about any individual being held to account.

‘We accept collective responsibility,’ the RTÉ board chairwoman said of the Toy Show debacle. When everyone is responsible, though, no one is responsible.

At the weekend, retiring newsreader Bryan Dobson predicted that ‘there are quite a few twists and turns left’ in the ongoing RTÉ drama.

And, as the inept producers of Toy Show The Musical probably never said, you could sing that if you had an air to it.