RTÉ board must go, but you all knew that. We said so last year

THAT’S the thing about death by a thousand cuts at RTÉ, the latest being Siún Ní Raghallaigh’s decision to quit as chair; it’s ugly and inhumane in equal measure and the kindest thing would have been to end all that distress and suffering much earlier. It’s a truism that bringing the car to the garage for a service runs the very real risk of faults being discovered all over the place. The same applies to any company in the world once they put their heads under the bonnet. ‘See this here… oh, and what’s this…’

At RTÉ there was absolutely no need to even lift the bonnet because the place has been a demonstrable wreck for years with a rotten culture characterised by neglect of corporate governance, feather-bedding, grandiose and entirely undeserved payments to the ‘talent’ and an out-of-control sense of entitlement.

Hopes that Media Minister Catherine Martin may have harboured that the problems at RTÉ could be fixed by a slap of cosmetics and a few sticking plasters were entirely unfounded. That’s now proven beyond all doubt.

Just after the Tubridy payments scandal broke last summer it was clear that drastic action was needed from the Government. In this column Catherine Martin was explicitly told that she needed to call in a Mr Wolf-type character, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, to clean house. Essentially, top management had to go and so had the board.

MINISTER Martin, together with her colleagues in Government as well as previous members of the Cabinet, mustn’t have been paying full, sufficient or any attention to a string of RTÉ annual accounts that revealed (because they had to) most of this appalling disaster, almost in real time. Included in those accounts was how RTÉ sold some of its Montrose land to Cairn Homes in 2017 for €108m, which boiled down to about €80m after the taxman and others had their taste.

However, after spending about €30m in restructuring costs RTÉ’s annual reports revealed how a surplus of €42m in 2017 turned into a deficit of €13m the following year. That restructuring was now an admitted failure and by the end of 2018 RTÉ had 1,735 full-time equivalent employees on the books, 44 more than before the redundancy scheme even commenced.

Surely Catherine Martin must have read those accounts after coming into office, and if so, how come she didn’t realise for herself the basketcase that RTÉ had become?

Kevin Bakhurst’s return as RTÉ director general was the Government’s last great hope for reform – ‘return’ being the most significant word. Due to his previous time at the organisation he was well aware of its faults and excesses – essentially he knew where the bodies were buried.

However, the downside of being a returnee is sentimentality, which encourages an approach to change that is more timid and incremental rather than radical. But it’s only radical change that’ll save RTÉ at this stage.

MR Bakhurst started well, supported by the goodwill of everybody with any interest in RTÉ, and was expected to have stabilised the organisation by this stage. Unfortunately, Siún Ní Raghallaigh’s resignation over failing to recall that the RTÉ Remuneration Committee had approved the exit package for former CFO Richard Collins and, on that basis, informing Catherine Martin that the board had no role in that exit package, means this tragic collapse of the national broadcasting continues well into its eighth month.

In January, following the Grant Thornton report into how RTÉ burned €2.3m on that vainglorious failure Toy Show, the Musical, Martin was again told here that the crisis at Montrose would continue unless the board got the door. That advice was also ignored, leading to the calamity stretching out for much longer than even RTÉ’s greatest critics could have anticipated.

The people of this country, who have been forced by legal threats and menaces, to hand over about €1.85bn to RTÉ in the past 10 years have been taken for a ride by those who presided over this cluster-failure at the national broadcaster.

But the real responsibility for all of that rests with the Government, Minister Catherine Martin in particular, and her predecessors.

The RTÉ calamity, brewing for years, has always been a political issue because at the end, politicians in Government have the ultimate responsibility, a responsibility they have manifestly failed to discharge.

With certain knowledge that RTÉ are incapable of saving themselves, perhaps now Minister Martin might finally summon up the will to act.

The RTÉ board must go, and so must anybody else still standing in the way of complete reform. The board should be replaced by those with no previous association with RTÉ, just a group of hard-nosed, no messing, unafraid individuals with proper regard for other people’s money.