RYAN TUBRIDY AND his agent Noel Kelly faced over six hours of questioning from TDs and Senators today at the Public Accounts Committee and the Oireachtas Media Committee.
Tubridy and Kelly placed the blame for the payments scandal squarely on RTÉ during the sessions, with Kelly responding in the affirmative when asked if RTÉ were “solely responsible” for the events surround the underreporting of payments made to Tubridy, and an agreement to underwrite contractual payments originally agreed to by Renault.
Throughout both committees, some politicians’ questions elicited more answers than others, while some were criticised online for not asking direct questions.
We have outlined some of the standout performances below. We have also included interactive player ratings if you want to get involved yourself.
Fianna Fáil’s Dún Laoghaire TD Cormac Devlin began his questioning by telling everyone who might be listening that both he and Tubridy live in the same area and that the locals think Ryan is a great lad, or hold him in “high regard” as he put it.
Devlin then really amped up the emotion by mentioning how much kids love ‘the Toyman’. Despite the sentimentality, he elicited one of the most personal responses from Tubridy whose voice trembled in saying he was “deeply upset” by it all and has been finding it difficult to leave the house.
The emotion didn’t end there when Tubridy said it’s been a “frenzy” and that he feels like he’s been cancelled.
Devlin then turned to questions about the timeline of negotiations, with Kelly fielding these questions in a rather more serious manner before calling Tubridy “the most trusted man in Ireland”.
Whether by accident or design, they were some of the most quote-worthy answers of the morning session.
After an explosive start, which included desk banging from Tubridy himself, Imelda Munster’s contributions deflated the atmosphere somewhat, leaving the witnesses as confused and bewildered as those tuning into the livestream in pubs across the country.
Although she interrupted herself during her first sentence – to remind the pair to keep their answers as short as possible – her initial questions were promising.
The Louth TD probed whether the Tripartite Agreement between Renault, RTÉ and NK Management was initiated to make up for pay cuts – to which she was told it was not. Kelly also told her that, from his view, he wanted RTÉ to underwrite that agreement in case of a change of sponsor.
Despite that bright start, things started to go awry once there was more interrupting of the witnesses and a misunderstanding of the underwriting of and payments around the Tripartite Agreement.
“We’ve sat through three weeks of this, there’s no misunderstanding,” she told Tubridy when he said that he believed Renault would cover off all the payments.
“I was always under the impression that money was from Renault,” he said of the payments – which we now know were paid through RTÉ’s barter accounts.
“You received €345,000 extra in payments, that was underwritten by RTÉ – the taxpayer paid,” she noted, conflating two issues – as explained here by The Journal‘s reporter Stevie McDermott.
“I really dispute that,” Tubridy responded.
Sinn Féin TD John Brady had some hit-and-miss questions but also extracted some of the most revealing answers of the day.
There were a number of issues that got under Ryan Tubridy’s skin, especially when it seemed like someone might be questioning his sincerity or his truth-telling. When John Brady pushed on exactly when Tubridy knew about the issues around his pay, implying that it may have influenced his decision to step down from The Late Late Show, Tubridy went from sharp (“Deputy, can I ask you, what is the question here?”) to imploring (““Forgive me, but I will be here until the last dog barks until you believe that that decision came from my heart and soul, and the kernel of it was last August”).
Brady recalibrated. Instead, he went after the so-called consultancy fees that never were. Suddenly Noel Kelly, who had previously engaged with every single question in a hyper-articulate way, fell back on the same phrases again and again. “At all times we were acting on instruction from RTÉ.” “Again, this was an instruction from RTÉ.” “This was an RTÉ request.”
Brady kept pushing. “Whose suggestion was it to label them as consultancy fees?” “RTÉ”. “Who in RTÉ informed you to put them down as consultancy fees?” “Geraldine O’Leary.”
Brady went for the killer punch. “You issued the invoices labelled consultancy fees, knowing that there was no consultancy fee!”. “We acted under instruction. We acted under instruction at all times.”
Verona Murphy switched up her tactics from last week, when she attacked the RTÉ executives in front of her, putting them on the back foot before they could open their mouths.
Given her chance today just after a ‘sos beag’, she used the opportunity to try to thread together the appearances of the executive’s last week and the men who sat in front of her today.
She said it was the job of the deputies and senators to “find the truth in between” the statements Tubridy and Kelly had sent through this morning and what the RTÉ executives said last week. She was the first to acknowledge that task.
“Is it your view that those untruths were intended to deceive not just the public – but the PAC – into thinking that you two gentlemen were responsible everything that has happened here?” she asked, gently.
Kelly responded that, yes, he thought there had been a lot of lies.
She also elicited the great line, ‘I’ve only ever met Dee Forbes with her lawyers and accountants’, from Kelly when probing his relationship with the former DG. And got confirmation that no pre-litigation letters have been sent from Kelly or Tubridy.
The Wexford deputy was also one of the only members to try to understand the absolute starting point of the Renault deal by asking about the motivations of Tubridy and Kelly when they entered new contract negotiations in 2019.
What gave rise to the idea that Tubridy should get €75,000 from an RTÉ sponsor? Why would Dee Forbes give away RTÉ’s revenue?
Kelly said this was something Renault wanted to do, adding that if that sum wasn’t on the table, Tubridy would not have walked away from RTÉ.
Former Labour leader Alan Kelly is an old hand on the PAC and it shows. He was precise and clinical, not wanting to waste a minute of his allotted ten minutes.
Sending in the documents for the committee at 8.30 this morning? “Insulting.” The Toy Show musical? “An unmitigated disaster.” And this extended to his comments on Tubridy and Kelly’s behaviour: he was one of the only committee members to dissect Tubridy’s woolly claim that he had taken a significant pay cut. “There was no 20% drop in salary. And to say so has no credibility whatsoever.”
He was similarly unimpressed with Noel Kelly and his I-just-did-what-RTÉ-asked approach.
“I think you’ve got serious accountancy issues here. I think your companies have serious accountancy issues here. Based on the evidence you’re giving here, the fact is, this is not how companies behave.”
But this wasn’t just an all-out attack on them. He noted that the documentary evidence in their statements about the tripartite agreement was “very compelling” and gave them “a big tick mark”, noting that it completely contradicted what RTÉ had said earlier.
They’ll have been glad to hear it – it was a rare moment of reprieve in an otherwise gruelling few minutes.
Peter Fitzpatrick once again took a combative approach throughout his 15-minute interrogation during the PAC. By the most charitable estimation, it seemed as though some of the details of the matter at hand had escaped him.
At one point, Fitzpatrick argued that “Dee Forbes and Ryan Tubridy had both jumped ship” from RTÉ at the same time, provoking Tubridy to respond that he has not jumped ship, and that he has been taken off-air at RTÉ against his wishes. Forbes only resigned after her resignation was sought by the Chair of the RTÉ Board.
The Louth TD also appeared to ask Tubridy whether he would return money as a result of having been overpaid, when the issue at hand is RTÉ failing to accurately report Tubridy’s earnings, rather than the presenter having been overpaid.
All in all, it was a confused and frustrating performance that yielded little by way of useful information.
“If Johnny asked you to put your hand in the fire, would you do it?”
It took nearly six hours of grilling before a TD finally asked the question that most viewers had surely been screaming at their screens since Noel Kelly had first justified his raising of invoices under the label ‘Consultancy fees’ as doing so “under the instruction of RTÉ”.
Kelly’s explanation – relying on the argument that RTÉ was a large organisation that could be trusted without question – failed to convince representatives of either committee, but Cannon made it the centrepiece of his line of questioning, exposing the absurdity of the excuse.
Fine Gael’s South Kerry TD Brendan Griffin has displayed a particular set of skills for unsettling wayward and rattled RTÉ executives at previous hearings.
Today’s appearance by Ryan Tubridy and agent Noel Kelly was no different and Griffin had his game plan well planned and prepared – he was going after Kelly’s reputation as the “real Director General”.
Unlike some contributors Griffin doesn’t use bluster – he is a quiet performer with his homework done and uses that to back his witness into a position of discomfort. In this case he had information about a dispute about the ownership of the idea for Operation Transformation.
With all the quiet menace of an approaching dark shape on a night time walk Griffin asked: “‘Would RTÉ executives be afraid of you Mr Kelly?”
Kelly responded: “It would always be healthy and frank. It’s RTÉ’s job to get the best deal they can, it’s my job to get the best deal I can.”
But Griffin wasn’t done: “Would there be executives afraid of you?”
Kelly replied: “Sure who would be afraid of me? All 5″6′ of me. And look, over the last two weeks all sorts of pictures are painted, but I’m here to work on behalf of my client.”
Griffin asked: Have you ever threatened to sue RTÉ in the past?
“No,” Kelly said.
Griffin’s method is to portray an incredulity that unsettles the contributor and there is a clear message in his furrowed brow – he doesn’t believe the story they’re telling.
Although the decibel levels of his questioning got to heights not necessarily required, the Fianna Fail senator got some pertinent questions in to the delight of many lay viewers.
Why did Noel Kelly chase money to be paid for services that had not yet been delivered, i.e. the second and third sets of roadshows for Renault.
He also got confirmation from the agent that his client had no formal offers on the table from other broadcasters when he was negotiating the 2020 contract.
There was much praise online for Niamh Smyth, the chair of the Media Committee for her deft handling of witnesses, members and the wheels of time.
Brian Stanley was quick to get involved if he felt a question was being answered, and he also had many questions of his own.
Was there anyone else who particularly impressed? Rate their questions and performances.
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