RTÉ DIRECTOR GENERAL Kevin Bakhurst has told reporters that he does not wish to continue discussing Ryan Tubridy in the wake of his decision to end radio contract negotiations with the former presenter.
Minister for Media Catherine Martin has met with senior RTÉ executives today ahead of another imminent report into the payments controversy that has dominated at the broadcaster this summer. The expected report will deal with RTÉ’s use of a ‘barter account’.
Bakhurst and RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh were both in attendance at the meeting, the first between Minister Martin and RTÉ since contract negotiations between the broadcaster and Tubridy ended last week.
Announcing the unexpected move, Bakhurst said last week that trust had “broken down” during the negotiations due to “public statements made without consultation” that seemed to “question the basis for the necessary restatement of fees paid for services for 2020 and 2021″.
He was referring to comments made by Tubridy the previous day that took a different view on the necessity of restating the payments than RTÉ’s position on the matter.
Speaking to reporters this afternoon after the meeting with Minister Martin, Bakhurst said that RTÉ had “positive, wide-ranging, useful discussions” with the minister but refused to go into further detail about the meeting.
Bakhurst was asked whether there had been any change in the atmosphere in RTÉ in the week since the negotiations with Tubridy ended.
“I think people can accept I had to make a decision about that,” the Director General said.
“One of the reasons we had to make a decision was that we need to move on. There’s some really important things to do with the organisation and I’ve really got to turn my mind to that, about the funding issues but also about governance and the changes I’ve already said I’m going to make.”
He was asked whether Tubridy is intending to take legal action but said he had no information.
Asked whether Tubridy was still under a contract with RTÉ, Bakhurst said, “I don’t want to talk about Ryan anymore”, adding that it wouldn’t be “fair” to Tubridy.
On how other presenters have reacted to conversations about reducing salaries, he said it “varies depending on which presenter you’re talking to”.
During the media briefing after the meeting, climate activists approached Bakhurst and Ní Raghallaigh and called for RTÉ to expand its coverage of climate change issues and to cut advertising deals with industries that rely heavily on fossil fuels, including aviation.
The second Grant Thornton report last week confirmed that RTÉ under-reported Tubridy’s salary by €120,000 between 2017 and 2019 and found it was “very plausible” that his salary was publicly understated by RTÉ in order to allow for “revised earnings” to show a figure below €500,000 in each year.
The Grant Thornton review also found that the RTÉ board was correct to restate Tubridy’s earnings and clarified that neither Tubridy, nor his agent NK Management, were involved in RTÉ’s decision to understate his pay for the three-year period.
Tubridy responded that he welcomed the findings “that I did not claim €120,000 in fees which was due to me in 2020 and that I did not agree with how RTE proposed to account for this decision”.
“It is also clear that my actual income from RTE in 2020 and 2021 matches what was originally published as my earnings for those years and RTE has not yet published its top ten earner details for 2022,” he said.
However, Bakhurst was unhappy with Tubridy’s response, saying: “I think it’s really important that Grant Thornton and the RTÉ Board restated the earnings correctly for those years and I don’t think it helps to undermine that. We need to all accept the restated earnings, that is the fact of it.”
Before the negotiations were cut short, Tubridy had been on track to return to presenting his radio show in September for a salary of €170,000.
Additional reporting by Jane Matthews
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