The wrath of the country rains down on RTÉ for a third week and it’s too easy to see why. It is Dublin 4, a semistate company and a slush fund. Irish media stars with notions. An elusive superagent in pinstripes. A rugby element (tickets, pampered advertising types, restaurants). Slews of lesser-known politicians turned daytime TV stars.
Add in the one third of the population that says it never trusted RTÉ anyway – too lefty, too woke, not enough GAA – and sometimes, the plots just write themselves.
Take one of the “characters” in this plot, Siún Ní Raghallaigh, chairwoman of the RTÉ board, characterised in one paper as representing RTÉ’s “radical chic – the whispering, cúpla focal, hiding in plain sight Siún Ní Raghallaigh, formerly of TG4 ...”
As critiques go, it was hard to reconcile this one with the flinty demeanour of the Donegal woman appointed to the job last November. In the absence of the main characters – the star, the former boss and the superagent/real boss – she’ll have to do for plot purposes, but it may be an example of how the demon-angel narrative can be flawed.
I’ve never met Ní Raghallaigh – described by Laura Slattery as “the director general that RTÉ never had” – but it’s likely that it was her “cúpla focal” of Donegal Irish that drew her as a founding member to the concept of TnaG (now TG4) and to serve as chairwoman for 10 years. It’s even possible that derisive comments like “cúpla focal” from the Dublin media is part of what spurred on the Donegal-born accountant to spread the focal.
The term “hiding in plain sight” hardly describes the shrewd, unsplashy business/creative head who began as a finance manager for Elan (a DHL subsidiary), studied certified accountancy by night over six years, went on to help start TnaG, salvage Ardmore – Ireland’s first big film studio – from near collapse, worked as CEO for Tyrone Productions, then secured serious investment from Olcott Entertainment to carve the sprawling Troy Studios from the wreckage of the Dell complex on a Limerick industrial estate.
[ RTÉ used barter accounts to cover €1.6m entertainment and hospitality billOpens in new window ]
[ RTÉ gives dozens of documents to Oireachtas committeeOpens in new window ]
If Ní Raghallaigh speaks quietly, it may be that she speaks like that for reasons that are nobody else’s business. Either way, a successful grown-up who speaks softly, concisely and with authority is surely a desirable role model in this shouty age.
Mark the contrast between her tone and the words that came out of her mouth. She named the method of payments as “an act designed to deceive”. She called the slush fund “outrageous”. She accused the station of bidding against itself in relation to top earners. She committed to publishing the salaries of a further 90 alongside the usual top 10 (a template perhaps for other marauding companies). She also planted a knife into the concept of the “talent”. The word should be binned she said, because it reinforces a Them and Us culture.
While briefly presenting a radio show many years ago, I was advised by a star to forget about print and get into broadcasting because that’s where the big bucks were. He was right, to a point. He was on the big bucks; my daily fee for doing the same job was derisory. He was a star; I was not. And the fact was that his star power brought in the listeners, the ratings, the advertisers, all reinforced by the face on giant billboards and the sides of buses. His advice makes perfect commercial sense – until it becomes obvious that behind the curtain, exhausted production teams are often running on the clippings of tin.
Ní Raghallaigh’s “bin the talent” call raises the issue of what we want from our pool of broadcasters. High-profile talent instantly polarises opinion. It’s fair to balance the current trend for thrashing the lot of them with the words of prolific author Stephen King: “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is hard work”. The notion that presenters are working only when we can see or hear them is plainly wrong-headed. There is a book in everyone as we like to say; it’s writing it that’s the problem.
The conundrum is that while Irish culture has traditionally discouraged self-promotion (a fact any high-level talent recruiter will confirm), broadcasting demands it. Decent, fairly ordinary journalist/presenters develop a cachet through screen exposure, but also through a bizarre convention whereby other journalists (this one included) seek to interview them, thereby turning them into “personalities”, and remoulding them as celebrities.
Pat Kenny named the price of this Faustian bargain in a 2009 interview with Shane Hegarty. To do these jobs, he said, presenters “have to sell their souls ... They are everybody’s property. And they pay a price for that and the only way you can pay them back for that is in monetary terms ...”
The confusion is manifest in a Sunday Independent poll. Asked who was most to blame for the RTÉ/Tubridy scandal, only seven per cent blamed Ryan Tubridy, yet nearly half thought he should be banned permanently from RTÉ. About three in 10 felt he should be back at some stage, and about one in four didn’t know or didn’t care.
A popular solution to all this is to put a cap on earnings so that none of it matters. Another might be for the rest of us to recognise that in a country with a population about the same size as the province of Barcelona’s, the cult of the personality journalist is a nonsense.
The nostalgia for Gay Byrne and the values he represented is notable in these weeks. But he too firmly believed he was never paid what he was worth. And we knew as little about Gay’s life as we needed to know. Why should it be otherwise?