Barry Lenihan

And the Minister really setting down the gauntlet yesterday on his way into the Cabinet meeting, saying that there could be no further gaps in the reporting of pay at RTE.

Again, during leaders' questions at the Dáil yesterday as well, David Sinn Féin putting it to the Coalition that they had allowed the latest events in RTE to transpire by essentially not keeping a close enough eye on the broadcaster.

an assertion rejected by the Taoiseach who also said that there could be no further gaps in how people are treated at Montrose.

So that really is setting the stakes for this high-level meeting around four o'clock yesterday.

You have the chair.

RT Chair Terence O'Rourke, the Director General, Kevin Backhurst, Deputy DG, Andrea Lynch, going in to the department to meet the Minister and his officials.

They met for around two hours or so and emerged afterwards.

And Kevin Backhurst essentially saying that the Derek Mooney case was an isolated incident, that nobody else was left out of that top 10 presenter earnings.

Like

Mr Mooney had been for several years due to his classification as both a producer and a presenter with the Dáil of course hearing that even the dogs in the wild knew how Derek Mooney was a presenter and Mr Backhurst also implying that nobody beyond Mr Mooney and indeed the late Sean Rocks had been wrongly classified as a presenter.

Kevin Backhurst also went on to say that essentially RTE had paid the price for transparency by reclassifying Derek Mooney to put that out in the public domain, that their decision to do that had essentially sparked this furore of the last few days.

And that was disappointing to him because he wanted to drive transparency there.

And essentially, RT had paid the price for that.

Patrick O'Donovan also emerged to say he'd been satisfied.

And amid opposition criticism of him earlier the day, he said he was a big supporter of public service media and remained to do so.

And again, Kevin Backhurst asked several times whether he was 100% sure was there anything else under the RTE bonnet.

He said, we can only give the same answer.

We don't know of anyone else.

If we discover something, then we're not going to hide it.

We're going to put disinfectant on it and get it out there into the open.