As PR masterstrokes go, you won’t see many better than RTE Presenter Claire Byrne’s decision yesterday morning to reveal her salary details live on air. By choosing to volunteer the information, Byrne has set herself apart from many of her RTE colleagues, who simply never comment on their own remuneration. It conveys an open-ness, and a desire to build trust with the audience. It also, not quite as subtly as she might wish, says “I wasn’t earning anything like that Tubridy fellow, for the record”. It would not be a surprise if, in the hours between this piece being written and it being published, somebody was to wonder aloud on her behalf whether this was not yet another example of the gender pay gap at work.
In that context, it becomes a very risky business for others in the media to criticise Byrne. She’s set herself apart from the rest of them, and is clearly not a villain. None of this is her fault, etc, and etc, and etc.
And yet, it is surely worth asking why a radio presenter on the national broadcaster is earning substantially more than the Taoiseach earns.
The Taoiseach, for all his flaws, is responsible for the health system; the administration of justice; Ireland’s diplomatic relations with the rest of the world; securing inward investment; providing housing and shelter; defending the country against bad actors and terrorists; and listening, three days a week, to the meanderings of Paul Murphy.
Byrne is responsible for asking people questions on air, and handing over to ad breaks.
To be fair, not all jobs are paid commensurate with their responsibility: The country would surely collapse in the absence of binmen, and would do just fine without the Abbey Theatre. Yet the great thespians of stage tend to get paid more than the people who remove your empty milk cartons. Skills are usually remunerated based not on their utility, but on how rare they are. The best argument for Byrne’s pay is that her skills are demonstrably rare, not that they are essential.
But… are they?
The most recent JNLR figures put Byrne’s show at about 327,000 daily listeners, or about 10% of the public who tune into an Irish radio show every day. These are decent figures, but not enormous. Consider Morning Ireland by contrast: That has almost 440,000 listeners, and yet its hosts are, according to the most recent published figures, paid less than Claire Byrne is.
Perhaps, then, it is time of day: It is inarguably easier to get listeners at 8am when people are in their cars on the way to work than it is to get listeners at 10am, when people are in the first of their 27 boring meetings scheduled for that day. Perhaps Byrne gets paid a premium for her ability to draw listeners at an off-peak time?
But that disadvantage should, surely, be cancelled out by the scale of her platform: Would she draw the same number of listeners if she moved, for example, to Today FM or Newstalk? The experience of Pat Kenny suggests that is unlikely: He was RTE’s most bankable star, and yet today he is regularly and consistently beaten by RTE in the ratings. This suggests that people are more loyal to the radio station than they are to a specific host.
A point I made yesterday in my general piece on RTE is that it does seem to be unusual in a public sector organisation in that it appears to consistently pay a premium for skills where there is no real or obvious need to do so: Its competitor private sector broadcasters manage to hold their own against it without paying anything like the salary Byrne is receiving to their hosts. Newstalk’s reportedly massive contract to Pat Kenny remains the sole example of any private broadcaster luring away an RTE top talent, which does seem to suggest in general that the market believes that independent broadcasters can be profitable without paying these kinds of salaries.
My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that RTE consider the salaries paid to these people almost as a marketing tactic: You hear that Byrne is getting paid that much money, and you sort of subconsciously are led to think that she must be really good, and her show must be excellent, in order to justify that sort of fee. It’s a kind of marketing that can work, but only if you have public money to burn.
The obvious question that needs to be answered is where else Byrne could earn a salary of €280,000 per year. It seems vanishingly unlikely that Virgin Media, or Bauer, or any of RTE’s competitors, would offer it. And if that is the case, then she is not being paid for her talent. She is being paid for some other reason, adjacent and separate to the question of what her market value is.
If you have a better idea than mine above, I’d love to hear it.