People in glass houses can’t throw stones, Ivan

NEWSTALK presenter Ivan Yates took to the airwaves this week to throw in his tuppenceworth to the fraught situation at RTÉ.

With a script in hand, Yates lambasted RTÉ Director General Dee Forbes, saying she should be sacked and clearly laid the blame for RTÉ’s money woes firmly at her female feet.

After calling for her blonde head on a platter, Yates went on to say that Forbes had done nothing but ‘bitch and whine’ and questioned her suitability for the role, citing what he sees as an apparent lack of reasonable resolution to the dire problems facing the station.

One has to wonder if Dee Forbes were a man would he so quick to level such derogatory accusations of ‘bitching and whining’. Perhaps he would given he is not adverse to the odd bitch and whine himself.

Take his sorrowful tale of whiny woe at the hands of AIB. After the bank secured a judgment for €1.6million against Yates’s wife Deirdre, he bitchily claimed that the bank’s pursuit of borrowed money was ‘relentless, fruitless, and inexplicable’. Former bookie Yates, who likes to boast of his business acumen, astonishingly claimed his wife Deirdre did not understand the nature of the personal guarantee she had signed when they went to AIB for a multi-million euro loan.

During his radio rant he again bigged up his business past citing his 20 years running a bookies’ chain, so it is quite amazing that with this depth of experience it never occurred to him to advise his wife to read the small print. He also can’t grasp the fact that Forbes inherited the mess that RTÉ is mired in.

It is also ironic that Dee Forbes’s fortitude in facing RTÉ’s cash problems head-on is in stark contrast to Yates who did a financial flit to the UK for personal insolvency when his firm, Celtic Bookmakers, went bust owing millions and leaving 267 staff on the dole. Yates, who is understood to receive a six figure sum from Newstalk and a handsome package from Virgin Media, clearly has no issue with his own high salary, not to mention his ministerial pension.

Before he resorts to unedifying sexism towards Dee Forbes as she attempts to work, not whine, RTÉ away from the financial abyss, he might look to his own actions first.