Terry Prone: RTÉ used to be a glamorous workplace. Where did it go wrong?

The Radio Centre completed the national myth that was RTÉ, sitting, as it did, a stone’s throw from the TV block with its gorgeous soaring staircase and the constant promise of meeting glamorous people in the canteen. It defined fame. 

The editor of the most popular women’s magazine, Caroline Mitchell, would tell freelance writers pitching to her that she wanted interviews with famous people, adding: “Famous doesn’t mean actors or writers. Famous means they’re on TV. Don’t waste my time with anything else.”

To walk through the radio centre or the TV block today is a whole different experience. Stained carpets. Failed double-glazing. Overhead lights literally on the blink. Functionality, just about. But no sense that this is the cultural and communications nexus of a rich, exciting, creative nation. 

It looks rundown and disrespected, rather as if a tsunami went through it, just a year ago, although that’s what actually happened. Tsunamis, unlike hurricanes, don’t get names. If they did, this one would be named Ryan Tubridy.

Generally liked, inside and outside RTÉ, Tubridy was the last man anybody would have expected to bring a seemingly impregnable institution to its knees, ruin its reputation, cause the precipitous departure of station “lifers” and explode its funding model. 

He was the heir to the greatest programme ever created by RTÉ, The Late, Late Show, his succession warmly approved by Gay Byrne. He had also inherited half of Byrne’s morning radio slot. He might not have had the breadth or bravery of Byrne, but he offended fewer people, hit his marks and — it was perceived — helped the nation survive covid.

Then it emerged that Ryan had been paid €70,000 more by RTÉ than he had acknowledged, at a time when everybody else in RTÉ was taking pay cuts because of a disastrous economic situation. RTÉ employees, some of them on staff, some on arrangements that let on to be freelance, were felled by the cutbacks. 

Children were taken out of private schools. Health insurance went unpaid. Cars were sold. Mortgages were re-negotiated. It wasn’t much of a consolation when Ryan Tubridy indicated that we were all in this together, since any cuts he took were from a higher starting point. But still, he was taking proportionate punishment, which was good. Until it became clear that he was getting €70K under the table.

While affronted colleagues were at the “Run that past me again?” stage, Ryan set out to sort the story in a series of catastrophic interventions, one worse than the other, each failing to register the level of affront, each apologising for the wrong thing (he remorsefully agreed that he should have paid more attention to RTÉ’s apparently lamentable accounting systems) each creating more offence than had the original €70k. 

Next, Ryan was in front of an Oireachtas Committee, behaving as if he were not an adult running his own life, but completely and gratefully in the hands of his agent. His misreading of the Oireachtas room hit its nadir when he made a speech about wanting to reinstate the special relationship he believed he had with the young people of Ireland.

The relative size and demonstrable idiocy of the original problem was what created the tsunami. With every consequent report, with every subsequent Oireachtas Committee meeting, the tide went further out, not just exposing those whose lack of swimsuits had, up to now, been concealed, but exposing a set of structures, including the “barter account” and decisions, including the Toy Show musical, which caused usually law-abiding citizens to decide “F*** that for a game of soldiers” and stop paying their TV licences. 

The new director general Kevin Bakhurst found himself bucketing towards trading insolvently. The previous director general, who, it emerged, had been instrumental in making sure that the extra €70k reached Ryan, disappeared. None of that was intended by Ryan Tubridy, who probably knew nothing about most of what the receding tide revealed. 

But if the Tubridy payments had never been made or discovered, none of the rest would have happened. Unintentional causality must be laid at his door, and what was caused was a broad-spectrum disaster with startling implications, not just for broadcasting, but for public accountability and for the workings of the houses of parliament.

Dee Forbes became ill. The consequences of her illness could not have been anticipated. Angela Kerins had changed the way Oireachtas committees operate, but Dee Forbes castrated them. 

Whereas John Delaney pitched up in front of one such committee and read aloud his legal advice concerning their competence, the former director general just sent a sick note. And then another. 

It is not suggested that she was not sick. What is suggested is that her illness has changed the MO for anybody, in months and years to come, who does not wish to testify to such a committee. The RSA recently decided it didn’t want to so testify — and fairly speedily got shamed into changing its mind. 

But the reality is that if a sick note is presented, no shame applies and the Oireachtas committee involved is impotent. Which will have unimaginable consequences for the efficacy of committees in future.

Similarly, the sudden recent exodus from 2FM couldn’t have been envisaged when Ryan acknowledged receipt of the €70k, but it traces back directly to it.

Bakhurst, like a man with a thousand jigsaw pieces in front of him, decided to get the framing outside bits in place first: nobody was going to be paid more than he was (an odd positioning, but OK) and the relaxed approach to 2FM folk peddling porridge from RTÉ studios was coming to an end, right quick. 

Except that Bakhurst had inherited a bunch of broadcasters who hadn’t been hired as broadcasters, but as successful social media practitioners.

The thinking — shocking in its ignorance and short-termism — was that these people, including Doireann Garrihy and the 2 Johnnies — would bring the audience with them. What was missed was that they owned that audience. It wasn’t an RTÉ audience and they could take it with them if RTÉ looked crooked at them. Which it then did, by putting constraints on what they could earn outside of the RTÉ day job.

The answer came, loud and clear: “We can make more money and make it a lot easier than heading up a daily show on RTÉ’s youth radio station. Byeee!” That, in turn, revealed another soggy inadequacy inherited by Bakhurst: the absolute lack of 2FM presenter succession planning.

If you look at major broadcast networks in the US, Johnny Carson’s producers had Joan Rivers eager and blooded as his substitute or successor long before he left. Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, likewise. In RTÉ1, Pat Kenny, in radio and TV terms, was provably competent to succeed the Maestro — and did. 

But going back more than a decade, 2FM planning did not include lining up a successor for Gerry Ryan. When he died, they brought Ryan Tubridy across from RTÉ1 to hold the line, returning him after a “great trouper” stint which nonetheless witnessed a continued decline from Ryan’s listening numbers.

Tubridy, and his fans and friends, look at what happened this time last year as him being — in Sinead O’Connor’s analogy — mugged by God, who then smiled on him and allowed him to get away from this unsought, unwilled injustice to another job, overseas. 

Understandably, the consensus is that he didn’t cause the poor governance in RTÉ (true) or the confusion about what constitutes public service broadcasting (true) or the rubber-band-and-spit funding model (true). He simply caused the tsunami that exposed all of them. 

And he didn’t do it deliberately. Mugged by God might be pushing it. He did trouser €70k at a time when he was preaching about collective RTÉ solidarity in the face of a downturn, and failed to correct wrong figures presented by his employer.

Now, the funding model has collapsed, and a marvellous version of “You wait until your Daddy comes home” has surfaced. Daddy, in this instance, being the Revenue Commissioners, the very mention of whose name carries the implication that whereas David McRedmond’s pleasant An Post staff shouldn’t have to deal with licence fee hostility, the Revenue would have no problem putting manners on mutineers. 

The problem with that is that the Revenue can’t come for everybody who balks at licence fee payment. There’s not enough of them.

The other problem is what, exactly, public service broadcasting is.

RTÉ’s scale and scope are shown to full effect during elections. But is that a function of size, rather than a definition of public service? RTÉ does news. So do a lot of other outlets, and if younger citizens have buzzed off to social media for their news, where, exactly, is the “public” being served, anyway? 

Other outlets also do documentaries, which are financially supported by Coimisiún na Meán because although everybody says they want documentaries, the actual consumption is relatively small. Small but perfectly formed, as — in many cases — is the product they consume. 

We are all for documentaries and arts programmes and we want them State-supported and ideally broadcast at night time. That’s what public service broadcasting is all about, no? And let’s not go near the current GAAGO mess.

Time was, we were as proud of RTÉ as we were of our national broadcaster or of the IDA lads bringing home FDI. Politicians were always suspicious of it and jealous of its power and influence, but in this case, politicians were way behind the general public. Viewers loved and learned from RTÉ.

It shaped understanding and was a constant source of new ideas. It mixed genres in a way no other programmer did. The Late, Late Show, for example, would run entertainment items north and south of savage current affairs interviews. It was the epitome of glamour, intellectual excitement, social understanding and fearless interrogation of our world.

Now, RTÉ is guilty until proven innocent. Accountancy consultants and governance experts are laying down its rules and regulations. Cap-in-hand doesn’t begin to describe its funding situation. Being famous, once synonymous with appearances on the station, now happens elsewhere. Politicians use its chair and director general as punch bags. We’re in the post-tsunami era.

There’s nothing to stop Government from deciding to rescue the station, rather than ration support. To go back to the vision of creative community responsibility. To demand, not just rule-following, but creativity, risk-taking, innovation, and relevance of the body that should be central to who we are.