Chapter 1: What recent developments have emerged in the RTÉ payments scandal?
Hey there, we are Indosport with me, John Molloy. We cover sport and we have things like this.
If you ask Arsenal's defenders, Gabriel and Saliba, to play in that PSG team or that Bayern team, they would be exposed as much as those centre-backs were last night. Because effectively, the attackers were on top. Then you ask the question, how many defenders were actually on the pitch last night? Because none of the full-backs have no interest in defending. They're like wingers.
And I've seen Saliba and Gabriel in an open game in that League Cup semi-final doubleheader against Newcastle last season get torn apart by Izak. I won't have anyone convince me that they can defend in that space. Tessa, this is the first time in seven years that a new programme is being released every Thursday with stories and stories to tell you about Eran Oles. I'm very happy to be here.
It was like I was talking to Stephen McCullough. It was like I was talking to the audience team. I thought it was something that was going to happen in the future and it was going to happen in the future. The press came to Belfast Telegraph and they didn't have a cast because they didn't know that they didn't have a cast.
So they didn't have a cast in that story because they didn't have a role in Belfast Telegraph. Seachtain. The end of the story.
This is an Irish Independent Podcast.
Do you feel that you are the right man to lead it forward? And do you feel that the structures are in place to stop this drip-drip of skeleton upon skeleton coming out of the door?
I presented for your organisation for more than 10 years. I worked there for 20 years, more than 20 years. But I presented for 10 years and I asked repeatedly and I never got a presenter contract. I was never paid or contracted as a presenter. And I should have been. Because as you say... I quote, presenters earn more than reporters. No, they don't.
I have to mention Sean Rocks. I spoke to his widow, partner, Catherine Bailey, and that, I'm sorry, that is a horrendous situation. He pegged for his loyalty. He pegged for his love of his work. The fact that he was actually categorised wrong for 16 years. They're going to have to leave their house on the 13th of July. That is not a situation that should ever have been allowed to happen.
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Chapter 2: How has the treatment of the late Sean Rocks been addressed?
It should have been Derek Mooney. Another year, it was Anya Lawler was number 10. She shouldn't have been on it. I think the most recent year was Dara Maloney and he shouldn't have been on it. So George Lee's name came up in the Oireachtas committee yesterday and it was like, oh, well, he's paid this amount of money. What does he do for that? And why is he on that?
And other news correspondents aren't. So being on the top 10 brought a level of scrutiny... to you, which isn't necessarily the nicest position to be in. So I don't think very many of the stars, the talent that were on the list, particularly welcomed having these figures bandied about. But when you look back now and
it would be a good academic exercise to go back and look at the top 10 list over the last decade or so and see, well, does it actually stand up? Because we now know that for eight years in a row, it was wrong. It was plain wrong because the Toberty figures were wrong and the Derek Mooney figures were left out.
Just to show you how confusing all of this is, in the last week, RT here have republished the top 10 earners list. And rather than putting Derek Mooney into it, they're going to put Derek Mooney in as a footnote so that people can work it out for themselves where he would fit. That's fine.
But some of those top 10 earners lists had been corrected three years ago when the Tuberty barter account payments came out. So just to show how people can get confused about this, RTE managed to publish a pre-barter account top 10 earners table for 2020, which basically didn't include the Barter account for Ryan Tuberty.
So they've said that this is not some sort of attempt to hide that, that the Barter account's money is still included. Somebody copied and pasted an old version. Yes, the old version. And that showed that Ryan Tuberty was on 466 grand in 2020. Of course, we now know he wasn't on. He was on about 525 in that year. So it just does show even RTE are confused by their own tables.
The other question that a lot of TDs were poking at yesterday, and the names of Oliver Callan and Tommy Tiernan in particular were being taken in vain for this, was that those two men who are very high profile, Oliver has his radio show, he has Callan Kicks, which does well as a podcast as well. Tommy has the TV chat show.
But some of their earnings, in Tommy Tiernan's case, I think it's all of them, are paid into a production company and they make the show and Tommy presumably gets paid out of that. And with Oliver, he's on a staff job or a contract job for his radio show, but the Callan's kicks thing is done separately, which means we don't actually know the cumulative amount he gets.
to discover where he would sit on that paid list. Yeah, and there were TDs trying to do mathematical exercises yesterday saying, well, Oliver Callan runs this company and the director's fees are this and the profit is that. So therefore, that's the amount that he gets from RTE. And you're kind of going, no, sorry. Callan's kicks is externally produced by a company.
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Chapter 3: What concerns are raised regarding the personal contracts in RTÉ?
Because, so again... apples and oranges. You can't compare the two. There was a third element then, which the TDs were outraged by, where the point was being made that, you know, Oliver Callan, he appears on annual specials. Callan kicks the ear. That's done by another TV company who hire Oliver Callan to, I presume, scriptwrite and as well as act out the main parts.
So there was three ways in which, yes, Oliver Callan can be paid. But does that necessarily fill in with the top 10 earners list? Kevin Backer said they were going to go off and look at it. I fail to see how on earth they can bring all of those figures together. To make it make sense.
Tommy Tiernan was the same because Tommy Tiernan's company produces the chat show, but they have to hire the hall, the cameramen, the equipment, do all of the production and resourcing to her and the guests and all that. So how much does Tommy Turner make out of that? I don't know.
Which all leads to a different question which we won't get into now but the outsourcing of things like Fair City like the Late Late Show which are being talked about and that will remove a level of scrutiny that the TDs can do if those shows are moved out because again if the Late Late Show
is outsourced well then somebody will be paid to do the late late show and who the presenter is becomes their problem but that's a whole other kettle of fish perhaps yeah but you can't have it both ways i mean this was the problem with tds oh this is outrageous that that companies outside are are doing this okay but rt are outsourcing those shows uh as part of their remit because they're actually finding usually that it's cheaper to do that
Let's talk then about more broadly the salary things, because it was kind of fascinating to see. And look, this probably happens in lots of companies. So let's be honest about it. This idea of personal contracts where somebody is at the top of their scale for the job that they do, but they're valued to the point that RT want to keep them. So they come up with some sort of way of paying them more.
Yeah. Yeah, you come up with an allowance or some form of stipend and you basically say, look, you're on a pay scale, but you're at the top of it.
What the TDs and senators on the committee seem to want, and it was kind of surprising that the RT management didn't have some form of structured pay scale that they have within the organization of people on different grades and different roles, because the TDs and senators are used to the civil service.
come in and you go, you're an assistant secretary, therefore you're on this pay scale going from, you know... 70 to 90 or whatever. 70 to 90 and you're at a point in that and you get increments and all of that. That's fine. That...
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Chapter 4: How do the payment structures affect Patrick Kielty's role as host?
You can go in there, you know what the minister's been paid, you know what the SecGen has been paid, you know what the principal officer's been paid, you know what the clerks have been paid, you know what people who come in at a junior level are being paid. And in RT, that's just not clear.
And I've seen Saliba and Gabriel in an open game in that League Cup semi-final doubleheader against Newcastle last season get torn apart by Izak. I won't have anyone convince me that they can defend in that space. There was also a lot of talk, Fionnuala, about morale in Orchard and how the effect all of this over the last few years has had on stars and staff. Stars and staff, I should say.
It was probably... epitomized best by Evannie Quillen because she having spent nearly 20 years I think she said 20 years in RTE as a sports reporter as a presenter decided to put her own scenario on the record which was quite interesting Yeah, Van Cullen decided to use her speaking slot to talk about herself. So she spoke about how she'd been 10 years without receiving a presenter contract.
And the point being made was that somebody is in the RT newsroom or the sports department. And then they become an on-air presenter. And is there an allowance or is there what we call a personal contract attached to that? So she said it was a two-tier system. Some people were getting these and others weren't. And it seemed to be a bit arbitrary.
I feel like what's actually happening is that you're getting away with a two-tier system. Because you talk about reclassifying somebody like Derek Mooney. And I don't really want to talk about Derek Mooney or a top 10 or a top 100 because I think it's a red herring.
She said that some were on incorrect contracts, but that was going back historically. She argued that she provided good value and that she had brought this issue up even with Mr. Backhurst and that it wasn't resolved. And she complained that. that she had been treated badly by the head of sport and the head of HR.
There was a different approach taken, I suppose, by other TEs because they were all saying they were being contacted by people. Alan Kelly said he's never received so much correspondence as he has in the last week complaining about matters in RTE, some from the public and a lot from people who now work or have worked previously within RTE communities. bringing up these issues of pay.
And that goes back to the point about the Derek Mooney aspect of this. Ryan Tuberty was on a different level to everybody else in the organization. He was the big star. Everybody knew that he was very highly paid because he was presenting a radio show and the flagship chat show. So people kind of couldn't relate to that. When they see Derek Mooney, he's on a different level.
There's a lot of people out there who are obviously producing and presenting programmes who are working within the organisation. It's more relatable to them. And that's why people, staff in RT are saying this one has hit particularly hard. Kevin Backhurst seemed to irk a lot of TDs by saying the evening beforehand after he met the minister that they were paying a price for transparency.
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Chapter 5: What questions were raised about transparency in RTÉ's financial practices?
And he's saying that this is all being portrayed in a negative light. But this comes with the territory. The question of his pay rise. Yes. 20,000 is what's on the table. It's sitting on Jack Chambers' desk, is it, waiting for sign-off? Yeah, so it's not just Kevin Backhurst. There was a review carried out of the pay of higher-ranking executives, mainly CEOs, in the semi-state sector of agencies.
RT, believe it or not, is a commercial semi-state body. They just don't provide any dividend back to the exchequer. This was looked at in terms of maintaining competitiveness, ensuring you're getting the best possible people in there. And the recommendation was what RTE, the board was looking for out of this was a 50 grand pay rise.
That went to the Minister for Culture and Media, Patrick O'Donovan. he pushed back and said, no, we'll give him 20. That recommendation then has to go to the Department of Public Expenditure. So it would raise Kevin Backer's base salary, presumably there would be pension knock-on consequences from it as well, from 250 to 270. That is now held up in the Department of Public Expenditure.
The Minister of Public Expenditure, Jack Chamberlain, says, I haven't received any recommendation to sign off on. It's still with my officials. No urgency, I imagine, there, given the ongoing controversy. There's a view within government that just as well they didn't rattle that one through, because if they had and this whole issue of the past week had emerged, they would have looked a bit silly.
It would have been thrown back. But there's another subplot, Fionn, onto that one, which is the late, late show question. It's over for the summer. It's on its summer break. And it currently has no presenter because Patrick Kielty's contract is up. Yeah, so Patrick Gill came in three years ago to rescue the show after Ryan Tuberty so abruptly left.
But Tuberty had signalled he was leaving anyway, coincidentally at the time that the scandal was emerging. So Artie had been in this position for decades. three years ago were finding a new presenter of Little Echo. Patrick Kielty, they put him in basically at the highest level they could in terms of that artificial salary cap that Kevin Backhurst referred to.
Kielty also, you know, because I think he was coming under media scrutiny over the terms and conditions, he waived some expenses as well. flights and accommodation expenses over and back from London and all of that. He's not based ordinarily in Ireland. So what is happening now is that three-year contract is up. Patrick Kielty, we were expecting he was going to come back in the autumn, but the
the talks are still ongoing. And we are hearing from the government end that this is all tied into Backers' pay rise. Kevin Backers needs his pay to go up so that he can pay Patrick Kielty more money as part of an overall package because his pay rise isn't approved. Therefore, he can't pay Patrick Kielty more money
It looks from recent days now that, as we said, there is no urgency attached to approving that pay rise. And therefore, this is putting the idea of Patrick Kielty presenting in the autumn in jeopardy. And Kevin Mackers was asked at the end of the committee hearing yesterday, did they want Patrick Kielty to come back? Would he be coming back? They said, oh, talks are ongoing.
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