The most recent figures I could find for the RTE budget date to 2019, and reveal that the national broadcaster costs about €340m to operate each year, of which about €160m comes from the television licence. While this is a very large amount of money by anyone’s reckoning, it is not much more than a drop in the ocean compared to the €10,500m (ten point five billion euros) expended within the state every year for the funding of NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations).
Of that 10.5billion, just over half – 5.5billion – comes directly from the taxpayer by way of subsidies and grants. The figure amounts – per a Sunday Business Post report in 2017 – to about 8.2% of all state expenditure. It is likely that these figures have increased substantially in the five years since those figures were reported.
There are thousands of organisations in Ireland swimming in state money. Given what we now know about RTE, which is one of the largest and most high profile of those organisations, what are the odds that similar behaviour is rampant across the sector?
RTE was not the only organisation to have financial issues arise last week: For Horse Racing Ireland, it was a good week to bury uncomfortable news:
The chief financial officer of the Irish Horse Racing Regulatory Board did not appear before an Oireachtas committee today as it emerged a ‘financial matter’ had been identified at the organisation.
Instead, the Public Accounts Committee was told chief financial officer (CFO) Donal O’Shea was “on a voluntary period of leave since yesterday” and could not come before it.
“I cannot say anything that would prejudice any investigation that might take place, and I recognise that we are funded by the taxpayer,” said Darragh O’Loughlin. the new chief executive of the Irish Horse Racing Regulatory Board (IHRB).
He said he preferred not to answer whether the individual “asked to take leave, or was asked to take leave”.
We cannot speak to what exactly may have happened at Horse Racing Ireland, but any time your Chief Financial Officer takes leave after an anomaly has been discovered, it is safe to say that what has been discovered is not good.
What we can say is this: The culture in Ireland of doling out literally thousands of millions of taxpayer funding to independently governed organisations is an incentive to waste, and to bad behaviour. When money is easily obtained, it is relatively easy and tempting to set executive pay at a few thousand per year more than might be strictly necessary. Expense accounts become more generous. Corporate hospitality and team building events suddenly become more vital to the existence of an organisation that would probably cut those events first, if ever the need to save money were to arise.
What’s more, a whole infrastructure of NGO service providers has emerged: Consultants and PR firms and retained legal advisors and continuous professional development course providers who exist primarily to provide services to state funded organisations that would, doubtless, find that such services were a needless luxury if funding was a bit more tight.
In the worst cases, this can devolve into outright fraud and greed: It’s human nature.
What we’ve seen in RTE is exactly this culture: Almost nobody disputes that RTE’s senior staff and presenters would never achieve anything like their present pay packets in organisations like Newstalk, or Virgin Media. The reason for this is not that the people in Virgin or Newstalk are morally better, or less inclined towards excess than their RTE counterparts: It is that they do not have the tempting factor of an enormous pot of free money to delve into in order to pay themselves what they probably think themselves to be worth. When you provide organisations with the resources to set their own monetary value, don’t be surprised when the people in them decide that they are vital workers worth hundreds of thousands per year.
The top end of Irish society is littered with organisations that are lavishly funded by the taxpayer: From the Irish Women’s Council, to the Irish Network Against Racism, to Pavee Point, to some of the bigger charities. Few of these organisations have to justify their existence by raising money from the public, and the money that they do receive from the state has the psychological impact of allowing people in those organisations to believe that their work is essential to the state, and should, presumably, be remunerated accordingly.
The public accounts committee should, as a priority, start commissioning full audits of all these groups, and make the public publishing of their senior executives mandatory. Simple rule: If you get a cent from the state in public funding, you should be mandated to publish the salary and expenses of your top ten highest paid employees. Shame, at least, might encourage some restraint.
Because if people think this scandal is limited to RTE, they are kidding themselves.