More secret deals at RTÉ – but who is accountable?

RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst may well be implementing reform at Montrose, but don’t try to tell us there has been accountability.

At the end of another marathon Oireachtas committee grilling, more revelations about the broadcaster spilled out into the public domain.

Chief among them was the eyewatering revelation that an exit package paid out to former chief financial officer (CFO) Breda O’Keeffe was valued at €450,000.

Mr Bakhurst told the committee he was ‘outraged’ by it and concerned about how the package was agreed. It’s all the more surprising then that he has decided to keep RTÉ’s human resources boss Eimear Cusack in situ, given she knew all about the deal, yet did nothing. Ms O’Keeffe’s voluntary exit package was approved by then-director general Dee Forbes and processed by Ms Cusack. It did not go to RTÉ’s Executive Board, as required, and was kept secret until Ms O’Keeffe revealed it during her attendance at the Oireachtas committee last year, prompting a review of all exit packages under the 2017 and 2021 schemes. The report into exit packages at RTÉ found the terms of the scheme ‘were not complied with’ yet Ms Cusack didn’t raise any issues. She was simply following orders.

Sinn Féin’s Imelda Munster captured the problem succinctly: ‘When it actually transpired that the exit package wasn’t compliant with the scheme, and you were fully aware of that, you still went ahead and implemented that,’ she said. ‘You didn’t flag it... you knew that the rules have been broken. You didn’t raise it with management of any description?’

Ms Cusack told the committee: ‘I look back now, in hindsight, I should have pushed back harder – I didn’t.’

Fine Gael Senator Micheál Carrigy told Ms Cusack: ‘I don’t think your position is tenable in the eyes of the public.’

Ms Cusack offered another line of defence under questioning from Fianna Fáil’s Christopher O’Sullivan, saying it didn’t enter her mind to ‘go over the head of the director general’.

That Mr Bakhurst is happy to keep someone central to one of the worst abuses of power at RTÉ as part of his core team and still insist he has ‘full confidence’ in her is telling. But it gets worse. Much worse. As the nation digests the fallout from the ill-fated Toy Show The Musical, which cost the taxpayer €2.2million, there was some solace that the person who spearheaded the show, former director of strategy Rory Coveney, had fallen on his sword. Or so we were led to believe.

Mr Coveney said after ‘resigning’ in July: ‘I met with Kevin [Bakhurst] over the past few days and told him I believed the tough job ahead of him would be made somewhat easier if he had a fresh lead team. I’ve tendered my resignation immediately to give him the space to do that.’ Mr Coveney, according to Anne O’Leary, head of RTÉ’s Audit and Risk Committee, ‘deliberately circumvented’ procedures that would have interrogated the financial risks involved in Toy Show The Musical. It would be proper that someone involved in such chicanery – that the committee was told about – should walk the plank and be accountable for their mistakes.

Mr Bakhurst told the committee that Mr Coveney ‘decided as events unfolded that his position was not tenable in the organisation and I agreed with him’. It all sounded very reasonable until questions from Fianna Fáil Senator Shane Cassells revealed Mr Coveney didn’t, in fact, resign but was given a financial package to leave.

The term ‘agreed resignation’ was introduced into our lexicon by Mr Bakhurst. A golden handshake might be a more suitable phrase.

‘We’d rather not pay out public money but sometimes you need to reach an agreement for people to leave and sometimes that’s directly with them or through a mediation process… sometimes there’s an agreed resignation,’ Mr Bakhurst said, explaining sometimes when you want someone senior to leave an organisation there’s no option.

‘If it’s finely balanced and it’s best for the organisation that that person leaves and they resign and sometimes you have to find an agreement to do that,’ he told the committee. ‘And that’s the reality at the senior level.’

This opened a can of worms for the self-proclaimed tough decision-making director general.

There have been two other resignations from senior roles. Were they ‘agreed resignations’ or just the old-fashioned ones?

Mr Bakhurst confirmed Dee Forbes did not receive an exit package. But what about the national broadcaster’s former chief financial officer Richard Collins who ‘resigned’ in October last year? That is legally privileged, Mr Bakhurst said, to politicians in a room where he was covered by parliamentary privilege.

The inconsistency in the argument is staggering.

Mr Bakhurst is able to give details of some former employees’ exit packages under parliamentary privilege but not others.

Earlier in the meeting, Mr Bakhurst said he wasn’t aware of any further issues that might emerge and spark even more controversy.

His refusal to disclose the full details of some exit packages ensures with certainty that the other Oireacthas committee that had been rigorously probing RTÉ – the Public Accounts Committee – will likely want further answers from the director general.

Meanwhile, Niamh Smyth, chair of the Media Committee, insisted that executives who presided over the multifaceted disaster at RTÉ ‘should have been sacked rather than going off with a golden handshake’.

During Leaders’ Questions yesterday, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said that ‘people’s trust and support for RTÉ and the licence have crumbled’.

She added: ‘People see the fiasco of excess and waste at RTÉ and they feel taken for fools. They also see the lack of accountability and frankly they have had enough.’

On this, the leader of the Opposition is correct, but her views on an amnesty for people who have refused to pay their TV licence are lazy and poorly thought out.

This, as was pointed out by the Taoiseach in the Dáil, would lead

‘ I don’t think your position is tenable’

‘Fiasco of excess and waste at RTÉ’

to refunds of millions of euro to those of us who obeyed the law and paid the licence fee, amounting to another seismic waste of collected revenue.

Ms McDonald said there was a show of ‘arrogance’ from the key figures who refused to attend the committee to answer questions.

The RTÉ saga will not conclude until we have heard from those central to the story, most notably Dee Forbes.

Closing proceedings, Ms Smyth threatened to evoke the committee’s powers of compellability for those who refused to attend proceedings yesterday.

However, enacting this on someone who has left the public sector could be particularly problematic.

Solving the funding issue is critical to the future of RTÉ – but so too is making actual tough decisions on reform. We still await Mr Bakhurst’s final, detailed plan outlining how he will salvage RTÉ. It remains to be seen if he can make actual ‘tough decisions’ – and finally give taxpayers some accountability.

‘This opened a can of worms for Bakhurst’

v1

IT WAS a case of déjà vu for RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst as he answered a further round of questions at the Oireachtas Media Committee yesterday. Mr Bakhurst has said that he’s not afraid to make changes at the national broadcaster but since he took up office questions remain over exit packages, early retirement and ‘agreed resignations’. While the €450,000 deal for RTÉ’s former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe was pushed through by former director general Dee Forbes in 2020 – a sum a disgusted Mr Bakhurst described as ‘outrageous’ – he confirmed yesterday that Rory Coveney, former director of strategy also received an exit package. Mr Coveney was regarded by RTÉ as the ‘driving force’ behind the failed Toy Show The Musical, which made losses of €2.2million. So, how much has Mr Bakhurst cleaned up the old RTÉ executive board and who’s now left on it?

RESIGNED DEE FORBES RTÉ DIRECTORGENERAL

Ms Forbes left in June 2023 following the fallout over undeclared payments to its once highest paid presenter Ryan Tubridy. As director general, she said she was ‘the person ultimately accountable for what happens within the organisation’, and that she was resigning with immediate effect. PAYOUT: NONE

REMAINS ADRIAN LYNCH DEPUTY DIRECTOR GENERAL

Now second in command at RTÉ. At the time of the musical, he served as director of audiences, channels and marketing but has insisted he wasn’t heavily involved in it. He was promoted in June 2023 to interim deputy director general, following the payments scandal, after appearing at the Oireachtas committee and saying that former director general Ms Forbes was the only member of the executive board who had all the necessary information to know that the publicly declared earnings for Tubridy could have been wrong. At the time, he said there had been a ‘massive breach of trust’ with RTÉ staff and the public. His role became permanent in December 2023.

RESIGNED RICHARD COLLINS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

Mr Collins joined RTÉ in January 2020. He memorably told an Oireachtas hearing last year that he did not know what his exact salary was ‘off the top of my head’. He later clarified he was paid a base salary of around €200,000, with a car allowance of €25,000. Mr Collins at one point told one of the