Ryan Tubridy has said he “should have asked questions” when RTÉ released misleading pay information for several years but insisted he had “no responsibility” for what the national broadcaster published.
The star presenter issued a second statement on Friday about the furore over €345,000 in hidden payments he received over six years, on top of a salary that was already RTÉ's highest.
The affair has plunged RTÉ into crisis, undermined its campaign for more public funding and led to the suspension of outgoing director general Dee Forbes.
Tubridy did not present his radio show on Friday, nor will he present it next week. “You can’t do a show that opens up with ‘what it says in the papers’ where you’re at the centre of that story,” said Adrian Lynch, interim RTÉ deputy director general.
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There had been no apology in Tubridy’s first statement on Thursday. “Errors” in public declarations were a matter for RTÉ and Tubridy personally could not “answer for their mistakes,” he said then.
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The former Late Late Show presenter changed tack in the second statement, apologising “wholeheartedly” for what he described as an error of judgment.
“While I have no responsibility for the corporate governance in RTÉ or how or what they publish in their accounts, when my earnings were published I should have asked questions at the time and sought answers as to the circumstances which resulted in incorrect figures being published,” the second statement said.
“I didn’t, and I bear responsibility for my failure to do so. For this, I apologise unreservedly.”
The affair relates to €225,000 in payments to Tubridy in 2020-2022 and €120,000 in 2017-2019, none of which were declared by RTÉ. With RTÉ on a cost-cutting drive, the failure to reveal such payments conveyed the impression that Tubridy had taken a bigger pay cut than was actually the case.
“For the avoidance of doubt, all my earnings from RTÉ have at all times been included in my company’s accounts that were prepared by my accountant and filed with the Companies Registration Office and all my taxes are up to date,” Tubridy said on Friday.
“My filed accounts with details of these earnings have previously been reported on in the media.”
Still, his company Tuttle Productions filed only “abridged accounts” to the Companies Office in the years since 2017.
Such accounts are routinely filed for small business entities. But they do not set out how much revenue is received in any period. As a result, it is not possible from the filings to gauge how much RTÉ paid Tubridy in any year.
“At the centre of all of this is trust,” the presenter said on Friday. “The trust of colleagues in RTÉ and the trust of a great many people who listen to my show. To them: I wholeheartedly apologise for my error of judgment.”
The hidden transactions meant Tubridy took a 5.5 per cent pay cut between 2019 and 2021, when RTÉ had promised to cut the top presenter pay by 15 per cent after 2019. Misleading statements suggested his pay cut was 11 per cent.
“Over the period of my contract with RTÉ, I have been asked to take several reductions in salary and I did. Indeed, between 2012 and today, my pay from RTÉ was cut by approximately 40 per cent,” he said.
