Bloated salaries are still the top symptom of RTÉ disease

THE drama, absurdities, pure entertainment and self-inflicted injuries that characterised RTÉ’s implosion during 2023 make Ryan Tubridy the undisputed News and Current Affairs Man of the Year. RTÉ’s collapse into effective bankruptcy, where it’s now entirely dependent on the rest of us for survival, was something like climate change, where everybody’s on notice that disaster is brewing but there’s nobody in power willing to meet the challenge head-on and do something about it. And like all tipping points, the effects were immediate and too late to mitigate.

Also, as in the self-directed ruination of the Catholic Church, there was zero public sympathy as RTÉ’s sin of exceptionally bad management and governance, mixed with the most enormous serving of hubris, was fully revealed. Another trust betrayed, another pillar of society hits the dust. And good riddance.

The grubby vulgarity of the under-the-counter, undeclared payments by RTÉ to its former top talent, Ryan Tubridy, wasn’t lost on people who live in the real world, outside the Montrose bubble, where houses can only be bought for a king’s ransom, if at all, where healthcare is in the toilet and where the perceived competition for scarce resources is heating up with the arrival of over 80,000 Ukrainians and tens of thousands of asylum seekers.

The RTÉ debacle couldn’t have come at a worse time for the organisation. Ordinary people who knew they’d have to pick up the tab were already in bad mood for countless other, more urgent reasons. You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille.

Another aspect of RTÉ’s disintegration was the offensive stupidity of some of the main characters. The so-called barter account and the flip-flops and the most inane management practices made clear the organisation was being run as if dim-wittedness was the required qualification.

It’s hard to forgive thickness. People hate being taken for fools. And that’s precisely what had been going on at RTÉ for decades, where our money was being used to bid up wages in a makey-uppy market for the station’s so-called talent. Down through all those years, nobody in management or on the RTÉ board shouted ‘stop’, and if they did it was only a whisper.

AND so every year, like clockwork, the ‘talent’ were treated to enormous payments for work that deserved only a fraction of what landed in their bank accounts. The reason: well, if we don’t match payments available in the presenting/ entertainment market, the talent will simply leave for other Irish broadcasters or, God forbid, even to England.

In 2011, at the height of the financial crisis, Liveline presenter Joe Duffy, defended fees paid to RTÉ talent as ‘fair and square’, including, presumably, the €408,000 paid to himself in 2008 and the eye-watering €950,000 for Pat Kenny the same year.

In fairness, he also agreed a 30% pay cut around that time, and when asked if there was an element of a ‘L’Oreal – because we’re worth it’ attitude at Montrose, he said presenters believed they were worth it. He also agreed that compared to the work of a firefighter or nurse, the answer was no.

Following Ryan Tubridy’s enforced leaving, Joe Duffy and Claire Byrne are the highest-paid presenters at RTÉ, on €351,000 and €350,000 respectively. This compares to the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who gets under €214,000, and the Tánaiste, Micheál Martin, who is forced to get by on €197,309. Go figure.

The ridiculously botched departure of Ryan Tubridy proves one thing beyond all doubt: too much money was – and still is – being paid to top presenters at Montrose. Tubs is gone and the sky still hasn’t fallen in.

These payments were merely a symptom of a greater disease at RTE – mismanagement. But, unfortunately for presenters, if the symptom persists there is no chance at all of the disease ever being cured.