Full RTÉ board must go and so should The Late Late show
IT’S absolutely galling to recall how RTÉ were the crowd holding everybody else to account, with banks and the bandits, priests and the politicians, lawyers and labourers and everyone in between hauled into the Montrose star chamber and given what for. They had us all fooled. That was until the Ryan Tubridy secret payments scandal exploded like an incendiary bomb last summer, with the fires continuing to rage ever since.
This week’s devastating Grant Thornton report into how RTÉ squandered €2.3m of our money on a vainglorious flop, Toy Show, the Musical, doesn’t come with any sense that the crisis at the so-called national broadcaster will end any time soon.
In fact the opposite is the case, with the focus returning to the RTÉ board and how five of that controlling body conducted themselves during that extraordinary time of excess when The Toy
Show Musical white elephant was being choreographed behind closed doors, and away from board scrutiny into a magnificent disaster. The glaring absence of corporate governance and the over-arching hubris and smugness at RTÉ is utterly shocking, despite even what we already knew about the undeclared wedges for the station’s then brightest star Ryan Tubridy and the management control systems at RTÉ, noticeable only by their absence.
AND so it happened. Some dreamer fooled by the faux popularity of the annual Late Late Toy Show persuaded RTÉ top brass that it would all translate, Riverdance-style, to the stage. We’re in the money! And then the board was kept in the dark. Think mushrooms.
And nobody shouted ‘stop’, nobody pointed out that the pester-power of children rather than adults operating out of choice was the reason hundreds of thousands tuned in for the Toy Show each year as Christmas beckoned.
The culture of entitlement at RTÉ, underwritten annually by barrow-loads of taxpayers’ cash to the value of about €190m, is what caused all this. But, even after the Grant Thornton report on Thursday it was suggested to Fine Gael deputy Alan Dillon – a really impressive member of the Oireachtas Media Committee – that the reckless decision to try to monetise the Toy Show success was the result of the Government’s banjaxed funding model for the station. Essentially the fiction narrative at RTÉ is that it’s the fault of the politicians for not giving them even more money than they receive in the TV licence tax. Incorrigible.
Dillon reckons that members of the RTÉ board who were there when those behind Toy Show The Musical did a solo-run should go.
The exceedingly stylish former Mayo footballer is right and wrong at the same time. Truth is, they should all go. We need to press the restart button, despite what Minister Catherine Martin says.
The public is all out of patience with this RTÉ basket case of a thing. And with RTÉ board chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh in a calamity interview on Thursday insisting she retains full confidence in all board members, even after what Grant Thornton revealed, it’s time for a complete change.
The RTÉ chair’s remarks were what the word gaslighting was invented to describe, even if that was not her intention.
The RTÉ board needs to be removed in order that a clear line is drawn between the past and whatever the future brings. This trauma needs to end, in order that rebuilding of trust may commence in a manner the public finds credible.
THE RTÉ brand is now toxic and major damage has also been done to the way people feel about The Late Late Show. Things will never be the same again, no matter how fond we still are of Uncle Gaybo. The Late Late Show has been running for almost 62 years, sustained by inter-generational sentimentality, mixed with soft entertainment and occasional, jaw-dropping surprise. But that was then – preYouTube, TikTok and Netflix.
The longest-running chat show in the world has been running on fumes for at least a decade or more. These RTÉ scandals have knocked the good out of it. We need Catherine Martin to sign a DNR.