It would be interesting to see a properly scientifically conducted opinion poll ask a simple question of the Irish public: “Do you think Ryan Tubridy’s performance as an RTÉ presenter justified a salary of half a million euros?”
In the absence of such a poll, we can only speculate on what the answer might be – but I doubt I’m alone in expecting at least 75% of the public to say “no”, with the rest perhaps undecided.
The thing about RTÉ pay is that it has been a scandal for decades, and yet no Government has ever bothered to actually do anything about it. Heck, by celtic tiger standards, Tubridy was practically impoverished in 2022 – just ten years earlier in 2012 he had earned €752,950 for one year’s work.
This was, bear in mind, at almost the very height of the most crippling economic bust of our generation, and a time when the unemployment rate had peaked in Ireland at 15.5%. One in six of us was not working, but Ryan Tubridy was earning three quarters of a million to comfort us about it on the radio and television.
That year, 2012, was also the first full year that the Fine Gael party had spent in power in Ireland after deposing the Fianna Fáil Government. It was a time when they were at the very height of their powers, with over 70 seats and total command of the Government. They had been elected promising change, and fairness, and equality in terms of the pain that people would have to take in order to put the country back on a sound financial footing. Ten years after making those promises, Tubridy was still pocketing half a million for presenting a radio show and doing two and a half hours of television each week.
This goes to something which is at the heart of Ireland’s governing problems: The refusal of politicians to tackle problems even when fixing those problems would be popular. There is a persistent refusal or inability to see problems ahead of time, even when a blind man could spot that they will eventually be your undoing. You need only look to immigration for more evidence of that: It did not take a political genius to figure out that enormous and unlimited inward migration would pose political problems, and yet our political establishment appear to have been taken by surprise.
Similarly, it was ever obvious that RTÉ’s salary scale was – to use plain language – nutzo. And yet politicians waited for the public anger to boil over before acting on it. One day, by the way, the same thing will happen with the Children’s Hospital, but politicians are content to let that happen too.
A decade on, but only after the inevitable scandal, there is now talk of a salary cap for RTÉ stars. Such a salary cap would have been a proactive and popular move by the Government a decade ago. Today it just feels like damage control – because damage control is exactly what it is.
The problem with all of this is that the public can never have a reason to trust in damage control, because those who engage in damage control are not, in fact, trying to bring about real and meaningful change that ensures that the problem is addressed. What they are doing – because this is a human instinct – is trying to take the heat off themselves. Thus, that very specific thing that you are angry about will get addressed, but the structural problems which led to it occurring will not be addressed, because there’s no real need to fix those if you just want the anger to go away.
In RTÉ, the structural problems are clear: First, there’s the bizarre practice of presenters not actually being RTÉ employees, but contractors with fixed term contracts for service provision. The rest of us are familiar with being an employee, but RTÉ stars tend to behave more like professional footballers, signing a three year contract to present this show or that show and then being available on a Bosman ruling free transfer at the end of that period, just in case Newstalk wants to sign them up. There is no justification for this.
Why not simply make people work as employees, and move them around as needed? If RTÉ wants to move Joe Duffy from Liveline to the Six O’Clock News, it shouldn’t need to renegotiate his contract: It should simply be able to notify him that his hours of work will be changing.
Second, there’s the general attitude to public money that goes well beyond pay: Witness the scandal of the flip-flops, with which we have all become very well acquainted. There are contracts like the one for a photographer to be paid €80,000 per year to take photographs of the Fair City cast – and do nothing else.
If RTÉ was a private company with a limited revenue stream, the attitude to money would be vastly different. As it is, the present crisis confirms that while any of our major parties are in power, RTÉ will never be allowed to go bankrupt. So, once again, the underlying problem of the culture remains unaddressed.
What generally happens in Ireland with scandals is not that they get resolved, but simply that the public gets bored with them and moves on. We saw this with the Moriarty Tribunal, where the greatest act of public corruption in the state’s history generated not one single criminal prosecution, despite costing millions in legal fees to uncover. We’re seeing it again with RTÉ. Heck, even I’m bored with it at this stage.
The problem is, we shouldn’t be. Nobody who signed off on those salaries should ever be employed by the state again.