Since when did asking a man to resign mean he gets €200K?
AFTER the week we’ve had it’s only fools and donkeys who could retain any trust at all that the billions of euro we’re forced to hand up in taxes each year are being looked after with anything like a duty of care. The RTÉ disaster show continues with even more serious revelations than the original Ryan Tubridy payments scandal which kicked off this extraordinary expose of management ineptitudes last summer.
And this week also, amidst growing concerns about the huge waste of taxpayers’ money, we had that woefully inadequate Health Minister Stephen Donnelly blathering on about how magnificent the new Children’s Hospital will be when it eventually opens at some indeterminate point next year, an obviously deliberate political shimmy to distract us from the eyewatering €2.24bn cost of the project. Look at this shiny bit over here, don’t mind all that boring accountancy stuff about costs and the like.
It’s enough to have the most zenlike people reaching for the cleaver.
When they were dreaming up a new children’s hospital all those years back €250m was mentioned as a likely cost. Then it went €800m, tops.
WELL, it wasn’t tops at all and by the beginning of 2017 the cost had ballooned to €1bn. Five years later, in 2022, the stampede in costs simply got out of control with nobody sure what the eventual bill would be, but there’d be no change out of €1.73bn, at least.
Imagine that; over €700m added to the cost of the hospital between 2017 and 2022 and still the likes of Stephen Donnelly hadn’t a baldy notion where the precise upper limit would be. Still hasn’t.
And this week we got the final, FINAL price for the hospital, probably, maybe, assuming that the still-unadjudicated claims by builders go our way. Which is likely, kinda, depending on – well, you know yourself. Sweet Jesus, what muppets in Government have we being relying on to look after our hard-earned.
Seriously, would anyone leave the
likes of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Tánaiste Micheál Martin or Eamon Ryan in charge of even a closed coffee kiosk in windblown Kilkee in the dead of winter, with the way they’ve presided over this magnificent squandering of our money?
Then, there’s RTÉ where even the new director general Kevin Bakhurst himself now has questions to answer about why an exit package was paid to former director of strategy Rory Coveney – a key driving force behind Toy Show the Musical which racked up €2.2m in losses – on his resignation last July, weeks after the scandal broke.
Only yesterday were we allowed to know that Bakhurst was aware of such an exit package, and agreed to it, to the cost of a year’s salary – which is best estimated to be at least €200,000. He can argue that in this case a redundancy did occur, so at least RTÉ will make savings from the suppression of the role. But he can’t ignore the fact that Mr Coveney – incidentally whose brother is a cabinet member – got a decent handshake going out the door. When did the concept of resigning without compensation go out of fashion? Goodbye and thanks. This is our money Mr Bakhurst! OUR money.
We should also be told if the RTÉ board was aware of Coveney’s exit deal? The implications, one way or
the other, are obvious and reinforce demands for a complete clear-out to create room for a new start.
Confirmation that the station’s former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe pocketed €450,000 in an exit agreement, despite the fact she was replaced by another executive on a full-blown, bells-and-whistles income and benefits package, adds to the trauma.
EVEN though the station’s director of human resources Emer Cusack knew the agreement with O’Keeffe wouldn’t generate savings she signed the letter for this goldplated farewell anyway, and passed ultimate responsibility to former director general Dee Forbes. Like a well-known former editor delivering bad news used to say: ‘It’s the f***ers upstairs, not me.’
On Thursday, Media Minister Catherine Martin was attempting to calm the horses by telling us she’d been assured by RTÉ boss Kevin Bakhurst that the O’Keefe exit deal was compliant with the
terms of RTÉ’s 2017 voluntary exit scheme. Which only goes to prove what a ridiculous scheme it was if compliance included circumstances where those leaving would have to be replaced and where no money would be saved.
All this of course was going on as the RTÉ campus was coming down with super-sleuth journalists investigating all kinds of dodgy behaviour in other organisations the length and breadth of Ireland. Yet, no revelations down the years about the goings-on at RTÉ. Hiding in plain sight, what?
One disgruntled farmer told me this week how he’d never again pay his TV licence: ‘Those reporters in RTÉ were all kinds of excited over some fella pulling a calf’s tail in a mart somewhere and not a mention of all that stuff going on under their noses at RTÉ. They can f***...’. Well you know the rest yourself.
And then there’s Brian Stanley, chair of the Oireachtas spending watchdog committee who proved that the shinners do have a sense of humour after all. This week he asked Breda O’Keeffe, all serious like, to pay back that €450,000 she received. A gas man and that’s for sure