Tubs got the sack but RTÉ deserves the flak

AT this stage, it is really beginning to look as if Ryan Tubridy was a victim of the culture in RTÉ, rather than a villain. He was pilloried, sacked and ultimately driven out of the country to seek work in London because of a perception that he, and he alone, was to blame for the secrecy surrounding his top-up payments, to make it seem as if he had taken a pay-cut.

But the more we’ve learned, in the dripfeed of revelations grudgingly doled out to the public and the politicians over the past eight months, it seems that secrecy has been the rule, rather than the exception, in RTÉ for years.

Secrecy

And for all the promises of reform we’ve heard since last summer, that instinct to conceal, evade and obfuscate clearly remains alive and well in the culture of the national broadcaster.

It’s almost as if the compulsion for secrecy is so entrenched, indeed automatic, that they don’t even realise they’re doing it anymore.

How else to explain the fact that, even as Kevin Bakhurst was promising transparency going forward, he was still agreeing confidentiality clauses in the deals done with executives being ‘exited’ in the new broom’s muchvaunted clean sweep?

Rory Coveney, the former director of strategy closely associated with Toy Show The Musical, left RTÉ last summer within weeks of the payments scandal breaking, and just before the Oireachtas hearings into the unfolding crisis began. There was no mention of a redundancy situation at the time – Mr Coveney was clearly falling on his sword. In a statement, he said: ‘I met with Kevin 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.’

If he was resigning with immediate effect, all Mr Coveney would have been entitled to would have been his salary for whatever period of notice he should have given.

He had been with RTÉ in various roles since 2007 and, under the Terms of Employment Acts, a person in continuous employment for more than 15 years must give minimum notice of eight weeks. It is, of course, likely that his contract specified a longer notice period, and indeed six months’ notice wouldn’t be unusual for a senior executive.

Yet in a statement at the weekend, Mr Bakhurst indicated that Mr Coveney’s departure was a redundancy, rather than a resignation. ‘Rory’s role became redundant,’ he said. ‘An exit payment was offered by RTÉ and accepted by Rory and, with no backfill being made, RTÉ will recoup that payment by July of this year.’ Since Mr Coveney was on a salary of approximately €200,000, the fact that RTÉ will have saved that sum by July indicates that he got a lump sum of a year’s pay on his resignation/redundancy.

So having cost the station a loss of €2.2million on Toy Show The Musical, and then offered his resignation in what appeared to be an act of accountability, it turns out that this development wasn’t quite what it seemed. This was not, as we were told, a senior executive taking responsibility for a regrettable situation and doing the honourable thing; in fact, he got a generous golden handshake on top of his substantial pension pot. And that, dear licence-payers, is what accountability looks like in RTÉ’s world.

More worrying still is the fact that, as well as apparently construing Mr Coveney’s resignation as a redundancy so that he could get a fat payoff, Mr Bakhurst also agreed to a gagging clause in the deal. In that weekend statement, the director general said this ‘binding confidentiality clause was agreed to by both sides and in the interests of fairness and respect cannot be breached’.

Why on earth did RTÉ agree to keep secret the terms of Mr Coveney’s deal, in the midst of a crisis prompted by the secrets it was keeping? RTÉ, after all, held all the cards in the negotiations – having said he was resigning, apparently for the good of the organisation at a time of peak public disgust and disquiet, Mr Coveney was not in a position to be laying down the law over the terms of his departure.

And as if the situation couldn’t get any more farcical, RTÉ is now apparently seeking legal advice to see if it can release further details of the payments without breaching the confidentiality clauses it agreed to avoid releasing further details of the payments.

It all reminds me of that scene from an old Woody Allen movie where he’s conducting his own defence, in court, and begins robustly cross-examining himself on the holes in his story.

Appalling

Once again, it seems, Media Minister Catherine Martin is learning crucial details of RTÉ’s ‘exit packages’ through the media, despite having been promised cooperation and transparency. Following the weekend’s revelations she summoned both Mr Bakhurst and RTÉ board chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh to a ‘maximum disclosure’ meeting yesterday morning. But, as the chair of the Oireachtas Media Committee, Niamh Smyth, pointed out, they’ve already had ‘heartfelt’ promises of transparency – eight months ago.

Yesterday, Deputy Smyth urged Mr Bakhurst and Ms Ní Raghallaigh to ‘come clean’ with the minister and the Media Committee. So eight months after we were first promised rolling heads, mea culpas and full transparency, the fact that politicians are still begging RTÉ bosses to ‘come clean’ suggests that absolutely nothing has changed, and there’s scant reason to believe it ever will. So far, the only one to have paid any price for RTÉ’s appalling mismanagement has been Ryan Tubridy – it’s now beginning to look as if he might just have been sacrificed as a handy whipping boy, while the real culprits sat tight in their wellfeathered nests.