Shane Ross

So you should have been looking for more.

Well, I think there's been an awful sort of letting off of steam in the last few months or year or two, in fact.

And there was a very powerful and very good report written at the end of all this by Niamh Brennan.

And she suggested, I think, 90 changes and 90 amendments and another report at the same time written by McGinty.

Those reports basically said corporate governance was a complete mess within RTE.

It pointed out the problems involved.

because of the board, the way the board was selected, because the way the board actually had absolutely no auditor on the board at one stage, which was crazy.

They didn't know anything about finance.

They had picked, I suggest in the book, the wrong chair and the wrong director general.

At that time, a director general who was, as you say, from the private sector, had no idea about public sector broadcasting and never made a program of any sort.

And then you had a chair, Moira Doherty, who was an absolute brilliant producer and the Riverdart sensorial hero in that sense.

But you didn't know anything about corporate government.

Yes, it was a small company, but her record in there, in RTE, which is in the book, was actually deplorable in terms of corporate governments, and she didn't seem to be interested in it whatsoever.

She was ill also during a lot of this period.

She was ill, and I think, I hope I've been very sympathetic about that illness, but some of the board committees that didn't sit, had they sat, and she was responsible for that, had they sat,

the whole poverty issue would have risen much earlier.

This is the extraordinary problem.

I think a lot has been done.

Sorry to give them the credit.

A lot has been done on the government side.