The crisis at RTÉ shows little sign of abating despite the resignation of its director general Dee Forbes early on Monday over secret payments to presenter Ryan Tubridy.
In a lengthy statement issued at 7:30am, Ms Forbes said she was resigning immediately adding that she had not being acting alone when it came to the payments and had taken legal and financial advice from within RTÉ when it came to the payments to Tubridy.
She said she regretted “very much the upset and adverse publicity suffered by RTÉ, its staff and the unease created among the public in recent days” and added that as the director general she was “ultimately accountable for what happens within the organisation and I take that responsibility seriously”.
She traced the controversy back to cost savings that were delivered for RTÉ in 2020 which followed “detailed discussions including numerous internal communications over many months with RTÉ colleagues, including finance and legal colleagues”.
She stressed in her statement that she “did not at any stage act contrary to any advice” and was fiercely critical of the board’s approach to her since the controversy erupted.
“I want to reiterate that I have engaged fully with the board during this process. However, the board has not treated me with anything approaching the levels of fairness, equity and respect that anyone should expect as an employee, a colleague or a person. All of this has had a very serious and ongoing impact on my health and wellbeing.”
Her resignation came as the national broadcaster remains mired in the turmoil caused by last week’s revelations that it paid presenter Ryan Tubridy undeclared top-ups of €345,000 in addition to his reported salary since 2017.
Despite her resignation, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Tánaiste Micheál Martin were among the senior politicians to express the view that Ms Forbes should appear before Oireachtas committees scheduled to discuss the controversy later this week although it remains unclear if she will do so.
The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley, said that if Ms Forbes was medically able to attend the PAC meeting on Thursday, then she should do so.
[ Dee Forbes resigns: The key questions now facing RTÉOpens in new window ]
He added that he also wanted the chair of the RTÉ board to attend, as well as the secretary general of the Government departments which oversees the media. It was important that the “central players”, the people who had been involved in dealings with agent Noel Kelly, come before the committee.
He wanted to know “who came up with this idea, who designed it, who put that backup system in place despite these powerful accounts, who had oversight and who knew about it?”
“In resigning [Dee] Forbes has raised several fundamental issues which give rise to serious questions which must be answered by RTÉ,” said the NUJ’s Séamus Dooley.
He noted that Ms Forbes had said she led discussions with the agents for Ryan Tubridy “together with other RTÉ senior executives” and said “it would now be appropriate for the Chair of the RTÉ Board to meet with each member of the Executive Board and to clarify their individual involvement” in discussions aimed at facilitating the secret payments to Tubridy.
The RTÉ board announced that it would be releasing a “comprehensive statement setting out its understanding of the circumstances surrounding the misstating of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings across the 2020-2022 period” on Tuesday.
It added that it would “also publish as much as possible of the Grant Thornton review, which was commissioned by the Audit and Risk Committee of the RTÉ Board, and received by the Board on Monday last, June 19th 2023″.
The circumstances that led to the misstatement of Ryan Tubridy’s earnings from 2017-2019 are separately being reviewed by Grant Thornton and will not be included in the statement.
Meanwhile three of RTÉ's top earners made statements outlining their earnings from the broadcaster.
Claire Byrne was the first to outline her salary. Speaking at the top of her programme on RTÉ Radio 1 she said that the fees that have been published for her most recently are correct “as are those published in the past ... no other payment exists or has ever existed beyond my published fee. Secondly my most recent published fee was €350,000 now that was the fee agreed by RTÉ for me to present both this radio program and Claire Byrne Live and as you may know I decided not to continue with that television show for personal and for family reasons
“And so in order to be fully transparent with you here today I want you to know that my RTÉ fee now is €280,000 and that fee was agreed for presenting this program and that last contract was negotiated by Noel Kelly.
“I recently presented the television quiz show Ireland’s Smartest and for that I was paid a separate fee of €25,000 that contract was negotiated by other members of the NK management company.”
Joe Duffy addressed his own terms and conditions towards the end of Liveline in response to queries from a caller.
“The last published figures for me in 2021 were €351,000, 300 [thousand euro] of that is for radio and 51 [thousand euro] is for whatever they asked me to do on television ... that’s the figure in my contract.
“My contract goes ... was due up this year because I only wanted to do four years at that time, in 2019. RTÉ asked me could they put in a clause that they would be allowed to ask me to do an extra two years. They invoked that clause three months ago and said ‘will you agree to another two years, the exact same conditions and no changes, no increases’. I said yes. The conversation was five minutes ... I said I’d gladly do another two years and they said ‘thank you very much’ and that’s it.”
Miriam O’Callaghan released a statement in which she said that “for the purpose of transparency, honesty and clarity, I want to put on the record that my most recently published fee from RTE – €263,500 – is correct, as are the published fees for previous years. I have never received additional payments from RTE that were not publicly declared”.
