Ministers claim memo release is geared to bailout
Deputies say handover of RTÉ document will end long row with State
RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst’s decision to surrender a memo on the secret Ryan Tubridy pay deal to a Dáil watchdog, was called ‘astute’ timing to seek Government favour over a bailout.
It comes as Mr Bakhurst is preparing to outline his blueprint to rescue the crisis-hit national broadcaster to staff this week.
He consistently resisted attempts by the powerful Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to retrieve a legal note taken of a virtual meeting between his predecessor, Dee Forbes, and Tubridy’s agent Noel Kelly on May 7, 2020.
He was eventually forced to hand over the document to the PAC after it threatened to compel him to.
The document shows Ms Forbes gave a verbal guarantee that RTÉ would underwrite a commercial sponsorship deal for Tubridy worth €75,000 a year. However, no contract was ever created by the station setting out this guarantee.
The latest development in the RTÉ hidden payments saga comes as Mr Bakhurst put staff at Montrose on alert for a ‘town hall’ gathering this week, when he will reveal his strategic plan to rescue the station.
His plan – which has been given the blessing of RTÉ’s board – will be closely monitored by Government
‘Cabinet confidence in Bakhurst has ebbed’
leaders, who will need to be convinced before loosening the purse strings for a badly needed bailout of the cashstrapped broadcaster.
Cabinet confidence in Mr Bakhurst has ebbed as RTÉ engaged in brinkmanship with Oireachtas committees over the document. But some ministers said the director general’s positioning was quite clever.
One Cabinet source said they believe RTÉ’s decision to hand over to document to the PAC was timed to seek favour with Government.
They told the MoS: ‘I would often be critical of Kevin Bakhurst, and his estimation has fallen among us since his encouraging start to his tenure, but I would never say that he is stupid.
‘If your negotiations with the Government for a multi-million euro bailout of your reputationally damaged organisation are coming to a climax, as RTÉ’s are, then you would be stupid to be arguing with the main Dáil accounts committee over a memo.
‘Therefore, the timing of his release of the “Dee Forbes memo” is astute.’
Another minister agreed, ‘it certainly makes sense to do it this way now’, but otherwise he was critical of the director general.
They added: ‘We had some faith in him at the start, but little by little he has proven to be a beast of the civil service machine and it is a little late to see a radical overhaul of RTÉ, if indeed, that’s what it is.’
Last month, PAC member Verona Murphy said a statement made to the committee by Mr Bakhurst that he hadn’t read the disputed memo ‘beggars belief’. The Wexford TD said at the time: ‘Increasingly, the committee feels that RTÉ are giving us the mushroom treatment [being kept in the dark and fed manure]. The admission by Mr Bakhurst that he hasn’t read the memo beggars belief.
‘He is not a solicitor, but he is the director general.’
This weekend, RTÉ confirmed Mr Bakhurst has read the hotly disputed memo, but declined to say when he did so.
However, a source said the director general read it ‘straight after’ the committee hearing on October 12.
Questions from the MoS on when Mr Bakhurst had read the note,
why he hadn’t read it sooner, and whether he had any regret over the controversy that arose over RTÉ’s initial refusal to provide the note to the PAC were rebuffed three times by an RTÉ spokesman yesterday.
The spokesman replied that RTÉ ‘has provided the note of the meeting of May 7, 2020 to the Public Accounts Committee, along with the letter from Arthur Cox Solicitors which summarised the note of the meeting’, adding it had ‘no further comment’. Pressed again to specify when the
DG read the note, the spokesman replied: ‘Kevin Bakhurst has read the note. RTÉ’s position regarding the sharing of the note with the PAC was communicated at the last meeting with the PAC, both by the Director-General and RTÉ’s Director of Legal Affairs.
‘The summary provided by Arthur Cox was part of the compromise suggested by RTÉ.’
Asked for a third time when Mr Bakhurst had read the note, the spokesman replied: ‘No further comment.’