When you write about Irish politics for a living, you get used to hearing “lines” – that is, an agreed but slightly implausible defence that a public official or political party can stick to when presented with some inexcusable situation or other. To give you an example, I’d cite the “line” issued by the Department of Health last week when Gript Media asked them about a claim made by Stephen Donnelly: Donnelly had gone on radio and said that the new National Children’s Hospital is not the most expensive hospital in the world.
The trouble is, the new Children’s Hospital is the most expensive hospital in the world. As such, a “line” was needed, because the one thing the Department can never say is “the Minister just flat out fibbed”.
The “line” in that case was at least innovative: Our Children’s Hospital might be more expensive to build, the department argued, but it will last twice as long as some others. So while other hospitals might cost less to build, ours will cost less per year of its existence. I’ll be honest: I sort of admired the PR person who came up with that “line”, because it’s at least creative. It amounts to arguing that two neighbours who each buy a €400,000 home have spent differently because one is in his 30s and the other in his 60s, and the first buyer will spend more years in the house. Nobody actually thinks like that, but it’s not altogether untrue. You could probably argue it with a straight face.
That said, in all my years listening to these people, I’ve never heard a line as dishonest as this one from Kevin Bakhurst, the embattled head honcho at RTE:
“Rory’s role became redundant, an exit payment was offered by RTÉ and accepted by Rory, and with no backfill being made RTÉ will recoup that payment by July of this year,” he said.
What does this mean?
First, the facts of which most of you are surely aware: Former RTE director of strategy, Rory Coveney, left his job in July of last year. At the time, this was described as a resignation. Generally when one resigns from a job, of one’s own free will, one is not entitled to any severance package. Those are reserved for people who are asked to leave either because they are redundant, or because their employer decides it’s best to move them on even though they’ve not actually done anything worthy of the outright sack. To be clear, to this day, RTE maintains the reporting that he had resigned:
Rory Coveney has resigned from his role as RTÉ Director of Strategy with immediate effect.
In a statement issued by RTÉ, Mr Coveney said he met incoming Director General Kevin Bakhurst and told him that he “believed the tough job ahead of him would be made somewhat easier if he had a fresh lead team”.
“I’ve tendered my resignation immediately to give him the space to do that,” Mr Coveney said.
That could hardly be clearer – a voluntary resignation. Yet Mr. Coveney, as we all now know, received €200,000 in an “exit payment” anyway.
This is where we get to arguably the most shameless and dishonest “line” in Irish history: Bakhurst’s argument that RTE will “recoup” the money by July of this year.
To explain the argument: Bakhurst is basing it on the fact that RTE did not hire a direct replacement for Mr. Coveney, effectively amalgamating his job with other, existing roles. As such, nobody else was going to earn that €200,000, if Mr. Coveney had been paid nothing. It would simply have sat there, in RTE’s bank accounts, paid to nobody.
The €200,000 amounts, after allowances, to about one year of Mr. Coveney’s salary. The argument then is this: Because we paid him a full year’s salary to go away, after that year is up, we’ll start saving money. He’s effectively talking about the cost of paying somebody to do nothing for a full year, and presenting that as a saving.
The problem is: You’ve still paid somebody a full year’s salary not to work. The bigger problem is that there is no obvious reason – at least none that has been made public – why Mr. Coveney would have been entitled to such a payment. If he voluntarily resigned, which was the claim made at the time of his departure, then he patently was not entitled to a severance package. And if he did not leave voluntarily, then RTE mislead the public at the time.
In any case, the use of the word “recoup” is shameless: “To recoup” is understood, in every single English language dictionary, to mean that money either lost or invested will be recovered. In this case, it is simply untrue: RTE will never recover the money they spent paying a person not to work for a full year. They are simply presenting their decision not to pay that person for further years as the recovery of the money they spent paying him not to work for one year.
As “lines” go, this one is particularly egregious, because it is transparently aimed at busy people who will hear nothing other than the word “recoup” and imagine that RTE are in some way getting the money back. They are not (unless Mr. Coveney, out of the goodness of his heart, decides to voluntarily repay it).
It does not speak well of Mr. Bakhurst that he would try something like this. And it does not speak well of the Irish public, if they continue to trust him to be frank, direct, and clear afterwards.