Give Ryan Tubridy credit: Watching his opening statement to the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee yesterday was to watch a far more naturally gifted communicator than any of those who are elected to serve on it:
Full video: Ryan Tubridy's opening statement to PAC. @virginmedianews pic.twitter.com/ebADd9eMDW
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) July 11, 2023
The most important thing for any communicator is to have a good, believable, and coherent story to tell – a version of events that is easy to follow and believable. In that sense, congratulations must go to Tubridy (and presumably to those who helped to prepare him for his big outing). The story he weaved before the committee was simple: He’d been thrown under the bus.
That story is easy to follow, and at a superficial level it is also entirely believable: Tubridy and Kelly produced convincing evidence that the arrangement for secret payments originated with RTE, was devised by RTE, and was largely hidden from the public on the express direction of RTE. They also produced convincing evidence that RTE sought to make Tubridy the face of the scandal from the very moment that it broke, and to deflect responsibility onto him. Throughout several hours of relatively poor and repetitive questioning from TDs, this narrative was not really successfully punctured.
Indeed, the wounds Mr. Tubridy and his agent suffered at the hearing yesterday were largely self-inflicted, rather than as a result of any sharp questioning.
Taken in the round, the story Mr. Tubridy and his agent wants the public to believe is that they are credulous fools who committed the lone sin of trusting RTE completely. Instructions to invoice strange companies were taken at face value and without question. Those invoices were raised from a second, lower-profile Noel Kelly company – CMS – rather than his agency, as a matter of pure coincidence. “We were deceived as well”, said Kelly in response to FF TD Paul McAuliffe. And yet at no stage was any convincing answer for the sudden change in invoicing procedure provided.
At this stage it should be remembered that Mr. Tubridy is a journalist. Indeed, per his agent yesterday, he is “the most trusted man in Ireland”. We were told yesterday that his agent kept him fully appraised at all times. And yet, Mr. Tubridy did not ask any questions or, we are asked to believe, think about publicly questioning the pay figures released on his behalf.
At times, the performance was grandiose to the point of cringe: We were told that Mr. Tubridy “cares very deeply about the children of Ireland”, and that “being very well paid doesn’t mean you don’t care” and that “I haven’t sat down with an RTE management person to discuss pay in twenty years” and “I don’t know if you know what it’s like to be cancelled, but it’s no fun” and, “there’s been a humanity bypass in the last few weeks”, and perhaps with a twinge of irony, “I’m not looking for any sympathy”.
But he was.
That was the whole point of appearing, after all: Just as the RTE executives threw him under the bus to try and save themselves, Mr. Tubridy was there to return the favour in order to save his own career. To present himself as the innocent, and the afflicted, and the just-as-badly-let-down-as-the-ordinary-bloke.
In that respect, it didn’t really work, despite his best efforts. Because while he is, very clearly, not entirely to blame for the fiasco at which he finds himself in the starring role, he is also very clearly at least partially to blame. There was no denial that he knew that his publicly disclosed pay figures were inaccurate. There was no denial that his publicly disclosed pay cut was not – as Labour TD Alan Kelly pointed out – really a pay cut. There was only what Catherine Murphy, with more than a hint of melodrama, called “the Nuremberg defence”: That he and his agent were simply following orders. Whatever their sins, the comparison to Nazi war criminals might have been a tad harsh.
But, political melodrama aside, the defence still doesn’t cut it: Noel Kelly’s objectively hilarious argument amounts to that his agency is but a small company, and RTE a multi-million euro company, and that he had no reason to question it. This is nonsense, because Mr. Kelly is not a small businessman: He is the country’s most powerful talent agent, who has run his business for 26 years and who had dealt with RTE for all of those two and a half decades. He cannot at once argue – as he tried – that the Tubridy arrangement was unprecedented, and also that it was something he had no reason to question. He obviously and self-evidently had every reason to question it, as did his client.
And this was the problem for Tubridy yesterday: He is apparently the most trusted man in Ireland, who simultaneously couldn’t be trusted to ask basic and obvious questions about his own arrangements. He exists to hold politicians to account, but he was entirely incapable of holding himself, or his own employer, or his own agent to account. He discusses matters of public interest, but seemed incredulous about the public interest in himself.
As a performance it was at times compelling. But almost none of it was credible. When he talks about winning back trust, that’s the biggest obstacle.