DEE-DAY FOR RTÉ
With morale at rock bottom, an angry staff say no more will go voluntarily and wonder how exactly the director general’s proposed cuts will add up
THE news that Gay Byrne had died was not the shock announcement that RTÉ staff had braced themselves for last Monday.
Instead they were expecting to hear whether they still had a job.
After weeks of speculation, the Montrose rumour mill had reached its peak last weekend, amid whispers that a major cuts package had been approved by the RTÉ board.
After director general Dee Forbes flagged in September that ‘things could not continue as they are’, the day of reckoning was nigh.
But Gay Byrne’s death from cancer put paid to plans to tell staff of their fate on Monday.
Instead Ms Forbes found herself in a hastily assembled Late Late Show audience the next evening, batting off Pat Kenny’s jibes about the state of her organisation’s finances.
In the homage to Byrne, Mr Kenny, now a Newstalk presenter, recounted in his youth how he’d tried to kidnap Gaybo as a student prank.
Mr Kenny joked that if someone had tried to do the same in recent days, RTÉ wouldn’t have the money to pay the ransom. Ms Forbes grimaced through her smile.
It was a bad start to a bad week. The following day, details of the entire review were leaked, prompting Ms Forbes to hastily email staff at 10pm on Wednesday.
The details were as bad as feared. A total €60m needs to be cut from its budget over the next three years. Two hundred jobs are to go. Its Limerick studio is to close. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra is to move to the National Concert Hall and the RTÉ Guide is to be sold. All its digital stations are also set to close.
The only popular note was that the top presenters will take a 15% pay cut and senior management 10%.
Ms Forbes was back in The Late Late Show studio to talk to staff on Thursday but the mood was not so jovial this time.
Together with head of news Jon Williams, head of content Adrian Lynch, director of commercial Geraldine O’Leary, chair of the board Moya Doherty, and four other RTÉ Executive members, she faced an angry and frustrated staff.
The executives were heckled and booed at as they attempted to explain their position. At one point, a staff member shouted up ‘there’s no point in your standing here and saying, “Oh well, we’ve talked to the Government.” Actions speak louder than words.’
Mr Williams retorted that ‘it was the job of 1,800 people to save RTÉ, not nine people’. Afterwards one of Mr Williams’s staff members in the current affairs department said ‘morale was on the floor’. ‘Make no mistake – these will not be voluntary redundancies,’ said one journalist. ‘Everybody who wanted to take voluntary redundancy has taken it. These people will be forced out.’
Another staff member bemoaned the lack of vision in the rescue plan. ‘Is this the best solution they could come up with, more cuts? Where’s the vision, where’s the leadership? How do these cuts add up to €60m – can they explain that?
‘People out there hate us. They hate RTÉ and we can feel that. Who’s defending us? Who’s saying it’s necessary to have public service broadcasting now more than ever.
‘I earn €70,000 a year in here and people might think that’s high but I work my a*** off for it.
‘Jon [Williams] called a big meeting of [current affairs] staff recently and it was to raise morale. But there again there was no clear plan about how we move forward.’
Ms Forbes has already said that the movement of the orchestra will account for up to 80 job losses. The proposed sale of the RTÉ Guide will also shift 12 mostly longtime staff members off the payroll.
But many employees are at a loss to know where the other job cuts will come from. ‘We’re operating on a bare minimum as it is,’ said one Radio Centre worker. ‘We don’t have enough people to cover for people on maternity leave or out sick. I don’t see how they can cut further – except from senior management.’
If the rumour mill is correct, one vacancy which could come up in the new year is that of director general. Speculation that Ms Forbes will move on in 2020 has been doing the rounds in RTÉ for some time. This week it was rife.
The 51-year-old Corkwoman has been in the job since April 2016, having come from the Discovery channel. RTÉ refused to comment on the speculation, saying only that Ms Forbes’s contract is up in 2023.
Chair of the RTÉ Board chair Moya Doherty dismissed reports of tension between her and Ms Forbes on the Marian Finucane programme yesterday saying: ‘I stood shoulder to shoulder with the director general… at the staff meeting. Of course there is robust debate… but there is no split. We support Dee and her team 100%.’
She also said that the board is ‘not involved in operational matters’ but it ‘cannot continue to sanction the deficit that currently exists’.
Ms Finucane – RTÉ’s fifth highest paid presenter on a €300,617 salary – said she herself had already got a call in relation to pay talks.
As previously reported in the MoS, Ms Forbes confirmed that bosses considered abandoning the Montrose campus for a greenfield site on Dublin’s outskirts. That plan has been shelved for now as the cost of rebuilding its studios would dramatically reduce any cost benefits.
Plans to close the Cork studio and sell off the four-storey building at Father Mathew Street have been put on hold as the €1m value of the building was deemed not enough.
The financial review panel thoroughly examined closing Lyric FM. But after a leak and resulting outcry, it it safe for the moment.
RTÉ refused to detail exactly how its plan will add up to €60m in savings, although Ms Forbes gave a vague assurance in a radio interview that €30m would be saved from ‘people costs’.
However, RTÉ sources say the redundancy packages are expensive and unlikely to result in much savings. The station told the MoS that despite cutting 160 staff since 2017, personnel costs actually increased last year by almost €1m.
It recorded a loss of €13m in 2018, citing the cost of ‘special events’ such as the Papal visit, the presidential election and coverage of the Fifa World Cup.
The station, which has bank debt of €50m, has recorded a deficit in seven of the last 10 years, with its surplus in 2017 achieved as a result of selling land at its Dublin 4 site.
‘People out there hate us. Who’s defending us?’
nicola.byrne@mailonsunday.ie