RTÉ SCANDALS ARE EGREGIOUS ...AND WE PICK UP THE CHEQUE

IT FALLS to all of us to clean up the financial mess at RTÉ. No matter what the detail of the scandal and the extent of the public outrage, we pay for it via a licence fee that doesn’t cover all the unnecessarily incurred bills.

We also pay indirectly through our Government’s bailouts of the national broadcaster, using our taxes, costing us all tens of millions of euro to date, with many more tens of millions still to come. We are not given a choice about this.

What must enrage compliant taxpayers is how RTÉ appears to be a law unto itself, doing things that might happen (inappropriately) at a privately owned fiefdom but most certainly shouldn’t at a State-funded entity. Added to the Ryan Tubridy secret pay deal, the heavy losses incurred on a gamble of creating Toy Show The Musical, and the waste on the purchase of flip-flops and other fripperies to entertain advertisers, is the bizarre case of the chief financial officer (CFO) made redundant by way of a very generous and irregular financial deal.

Needless to say, the foot soldiers made redundant at RTÉ did not enjoy the same treatment as the officer class.

Speculation is that former CFO Breda O’Keeffe got a package worth over €400,000 on her departure. Seemingly, this was courtesy of the generosity of then-director general Dee Forbes because few others seem to have known what was going on, including the executive board which was required to approve the payment, and which didn’t.

The full information remains undisclosed because Forbes has been declared as too medically unwell to engage with any of the McCann Fitzgerald investigators (just as she hasn’t appeared in front of Oireachtas committees to answer legitimate questions). Everyone wishes her a speedy return to health, not just for her own sake but so that the public can hear from her.

O’KEEFFE, after a feisty performance at one public Oireachtas committee meeting that was regarded somewhat differently after more information subsequently emerged that was at odds with her contentions, has furnished her information to the solicitors at McCann Fitzgerald in writing rather than orally. There’s less room for error in that approach.

Her departure from RTÉ was not by the book, however (although that is not to impute fault to her). The law requires a position rather than a person to be made redundant. The job a person leaves is to be extinguished and the departee is compensated for that. What happens at some companies is that another job may be created, with some similar but not all the responsibilities, but which is paid at a lower rate, creating the saving that justifies the investment in the redundancy. But that didn’t happen here.

O’Keeffe, who enjoyed a long and lucrative career in business before joining RTÉ just after the turn of the century, applied to Forbes (as her line manager) for admission to a widely available redundancy scheme, although it was far from clear that she would be successful. She wrote to McCann Fitzgerald claiming that she identified savings of €200,000 that would arise by promoting a replacement internally. That saving didn’t happen, however, and it was clear it wouldn’t happen by the time her exit package was completed.

O’Keeffe’s solicitors told the review that RTÉ making cost savings from her exit under the scheme ‘was entirely the responsibility of the former director general and not her’. Applicants to the exit scheme were ‘not responsible for ensuring that cost savings were achieved by their departure’, the review said and that makes sense. Instead, Richard Collins (since gone) was hired on a €200,000-plus deal as her direct replacement.

The Revenue Commissioners are certain to be interested in whether RTÉ claimed a tax saving that wasn’t due to it because of that manoeuvre. Others may continue to investigate how and why the executive management board wasn’t required to give approval as it did it in hundreds of other cases – and why it didn’t ask questions when it realised that a fellow member was on the way out the door before reaching retirement age.

Some people suspected something might be amiss: RTÉ’s head of human resources apparently queried whether it was a ‘good idea’ for the CFO to leave under the exit scheme and had asked ‘how this would generate cost savings’. The human resources director told the review that Forbes replied that ‘cost savings would be made and the matter was not discussed further’.

It would be easy to simply blame Forbes for going on solo runs, for doing things that others didn’t notice or may not have cared to query. She is also central to the secret deal to top up Tubridy’s pay and knows plenty about the real story behind Toy Story The Musical. But while her responsibility is large it is not total and to pin all on her would allow others off the hook, among both the board of directors and the management executive.

After all, Forbes wasn’t the only one who knew about, or should have known about, the scandal of wrongly categorising up to 700 people as self-employed in a taxdodging manoeuvre (not all of which happened under her watch, being a long-running systemic dodge). This is something that is under investigation by the Department of Social Protection and has already resulted in extra payments to the Revenue Commissioners.

YESTERDAY, Media Minister Catherine Martin said the McCann Fitzgerald report ‘demonstrates an appalling disregard for the principles of equity, fairness and transparency in the treatment of staff’. Martin was so outraged that she has sent it to two more committees for investigation. But she seems satisfied that Kevin Bakhurst has assured her that ‘the control and oversight reforms, introduced over the past number of months, will ensure that this will not happen again’.

If only it could all be assigned to the sins and errors of the past, purged by the belief that such things will never happen again now that serious adults are at the helm. Except that the media landscape has changed dramatically and RTÉ would be bust if it couldn’t depend on the financial support of the Government.

Meanwhile, the same Government labours to find a way to save RTÉ, deeming it too essential to fall. This led to Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald – who may take more scarce money from RTÉ if she is successful in a libel action against it – filleting Green Party leader Eamon Ryan in the Dáil yesterday for the Government’s pussy-footing on deciding upon a sustainable way of financing RTÉ.

Which, whichever method is chosen, will ultimately come from your pocket.