LAST UPDATE | 30 Jan
WHEN THE NEWS finally came out last summer about the real amount of money paid to Ryan Tubridy for work he did and did not do for the state broadcaster and a car company, there was a mixture of two very contrasting reactions from most of the RTÉ staff I know and have had the pleasure of working with over the years.
The older and greyer members of the RTÉ newsroom and radio show teams were barely shocked. They have been hearing for years that the scale of the big stars’ wages in Donnybrook was pretty much determined by the size of the audience for their shows, and that the shows’ sponsors paid ‘the big bucks’ for the big stars.
So, with Renault still apparently ready to stand up and pour cash into the sponsorship of all events underway on RTÉ1 TV every Friday night between 9.30 pm and 11.30 pm, there was a perception among many staffers that the show’s host could effectively name his price – using that principle or whatever other deal he and his agent could negotiate for appearances and more get the highest fee possible paid.
It wasn’t the much-criticised Director General Dee Forbes who introduced these principles when I was working on the staff in RTÉ. She wasn’t even in the organisation when this ridiculous level of fee payment began. It was Cathal Goan and Bob Collins the two DGs in office long before her who first had to stand up at public gatherings of staff and answer direct questions from colleagues at meetings I was at when it came to the annual media circus over six-figure salaries being paid to people on air for less than three hours a day in some cases.
Like many other colleagues working in the regions for RTÉ, we tuned into most of those briefings over internal radio links from Donnybrook to studios like Athlone, Galway, Limerick and Cork. Nobody in our regional studio building in Athlone was ever paid anywhere near a hundred thousand euros a year to work in RTÉ so we were often bemused, to put it mildly, to hear somebody say that the cash was there — so to speak – as long as the market dictated as such.
The market may well have justified some portion of the elevated fees for the top ten presenters during the Celtic Tiger era. We all know the mad scamper that went on for TV and radio advertising during the construction boom. After the Irish economy collapsed in 2008 however, and the Troika of the EU, the ECB and the IMF came in, many of us naively thought that position might have changed.
Turns out we were wrong about that. Secret deals were still being hatched to facilitate arrangements and even though there were some wage cuts, the biggest star held onto a very large pot until the exposure of the auditors in the Spring of last year.
The reaction of younger colleagues in Donnybrook to the “crazy fees” controversy last year was very different to their more senior colleagues. In stark contrast to the veterans, I remember chatting with one young studio-based staff member who was absolutely livid and ready to confront Ryan Tubridy personally when the story broke.
She described it best to me in a text telling me that the staggering fees paid to Tubridy, and others were making her “blood boil” while younger people paid by agencies to act in roles such as ‘runners’ in the organisation, and often working directly alongside the big stars, were being paid little more than the minimum wage.
“The runners are usually students and normally get minimum wages but when they’ve two years done many got dropped like a snot in case they would build up any more rights in their employment. It was just sickening.” She told me with an air of total exasperation.
Confirmation on Monday of this week of the latest top ten list will not have eased that pain for younger staff, who are not paid anything near a hundred thousand euros in RTÉ. They are now watching the latest series of cuts being co-ordinated in Donnybrook as the state broadcaster tries to shape up to the challenge caused by the Tubridy scandal and there are still many dark days to come as up to 400 are asked to leave the organisation – voluntarily or otherwise.
RTÉ is a great place to work. Despite all that has happened since last summer, the station still presents cutting edge journalism on shows such as RTÉ Investigates. Radio documentaries are consistently of high quality and we need the station’s independence more than ever before, but the demise of the licence fee has led to a new threat to key platforms of the organisation and unless the new contracts for the top ten reflect a much wider trawl for new efficiency levels in the management of the place, there will be worse to come.
Ciaran Mullooly worked for RTÉ News for 26 years. A former Midlands Correspondent, he is the author of three books: Death on Holy Thursday: the shooting of John Carthy in Abbeylara (2008), Back to the Future, reflections on a career in journalism (2016) and The Future is Now. Life after RTÉ and the challenge facing the midlands (2023).
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