Raging RTÉ staff grill Bakhurst, brand latest report ‘beyond tragic’
RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst struggled to contain staff anger at a meeting to discuss the report into redundancy schemes at the troubled broadcaster, the Irish Daily Mail can reveal.
Mr Bakhurst addressed the ‘townhall’ meeting of staff in the Late Late Show studio yesterday as the long-awaited report on exit schemes at RTÉ was finally released.
Mr Bakhurst is understood to have told staff in attendance that ‘one person’ delayed the publication of the Voluntary Exit Package (VEP) review with legal challenges.
He is understood to have said that ‘RTÉ accepts responsibility’ for the issues raised in the report, which found that an exit package for former Chief Financial Officer Breda O’Keeffe was not sanctioned by the executive board.
However, he pointed out that this was an agreed line between RTÉ and Ms O’Keeffe’s legal team.
Ms O’Keeffe secured a package believed to be worth up to €400,000 despite the fact her role was not suppressed as required by employment law.
Mr Bakhurst also emphasised that the HR department in RTÉ was ‘instructed’ by the former director general Dee Forbes to send Ms O’Keeffe a letter which put her redundancy on a legal footing.
The letter stated that the executive board had signed off on it when this was not the case. The head of HR, Eimear Cusack, was part of the executive when the letter was sent.
Ms Cusack was present for the townhall and spoke on several occasions but remained silent when Mr Bakhurst fielded questions about Ms O’Keeffe’s exit.
But Bakhurst has struggled to contain staff anger in what is just the latest in a number of damning reports into RTÉ.
‘I don’t care if she was told by the DG, if the DG tells you to jump out a window, you don’t,’ one staff member said. Speaking after the meeting, one staffer told the Mail: ‘That just isn’t good enough, you’re a HR professional, you should have said, “sorry this is not procedure, it’s outside the terms of the scheme offered to everyone else, and it has not gone to the executive board.”
‘So then three people knew [about the package]. It had not gone to the board, how could Eimear Cusack stand over it?
‘At some point you can’t say I was following orders. You can’t just follow orders, you’re a highly paid professional. There is huge frustration about HR. That’s their one job – to follow procedure.
‘It’s a damning report about a current member of the interim leadership team and we didn’t get to read it beforehand and properly ask questions.’
In fact, the report was only circulated to staff as the meeting was taking place and many employees were left fuming that they had virtually no time to read the findings in any depth and to be able to ask relevant questions.
Another member of staff told the Mail that the state of affairs in RTÉ is ‘just beyond tragic’.
‘When you sit back and think about everything – from Tubridy’s pay, the Toy Show the Musical and now the exit deal – it makes you so angry.
‘We have a rat infestation, ceilings falling down and injuring people, and fumes coming into studios.
‘The place is literally falling apart and people were given free rein to waste €2.2million on a passion project and private gold handshakes to leave the organisation. It is all extremely disheartening.’
presentations from polling companies Red C and Behaviours and Attitudes who carried out surveys for RTÉ both internally among staff and externally with the public on sentiment towards the national broadcaster.
One source at the meeting said that a majority of those surveyed said that greater transparency around practices at RTÉ would improve the feeling towards the organisation.
‘What was the point in that? It basically told us what we all know,’ the source remarked.