It would make no sense to sell RTÉ's Donnybrook campus, says Bakhurst

RTÉ would make an estimated €100 million from the sale of its Dublin 4 campus, far lower than the €300 million-€500 million estimate that some politicians have said it could be worth, director general Kevin Bakhurst told staff.

At a briefing on RTÉ’s strategic plan at Montrose, Mr Bakhurst said the net cost of moving RTÉ from the Donnybrook campus would be €100 million-€200 million. He told employees it made “no sense” to sell the campus, but that RTÉ would look later at options to put a further portion of the land on the market.

Speaking later to The Irish Times, Mr Bakhurst said RTÉ was looking to buy “central, flexible and modern” new studios in Cork that would give it the capacity to increase production in the city. The existing studios, which have been valued at €2 million, were “not fit for purpose and keep flooding”, he said.

If it decides to sell a further portion of the land in Donnybrook, it will likely seek to shave off the area occupied by its radio centre, administration building and canteen, all of which are listed buildings. Its preliminary discussions with property agents, however, suggest there is “not much interest” in the listed buildings.

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Mr Bakhurst briefed staff on the plan on Tuesday at a “town hall” meeting held in The Late Late Show studio on RTÉ’s Donnybrook campus. There was significant annoyance among many staff that the contents had been widely reported by media outlets, initially by The Irish Times, the previous day.

Mr Bakhurst is likely to face opposition from unions with both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Siptu over elements of the plan.

The document, A New Direction for RTÉ, proposes cost savings, including a 20 per cent reduction in headcount by 2028, as well as a 50 per cent increase in spending on outside commissioning, decentralisation of operations outside Dublin, and a range of financial and governance reforms, including an anonymised register of the top 100 earners.

“It’s important that we have these town halls… but I think people left still feeling uncertain,” Gorretti Slavin, an employee at RTÉ Drama at One, said on Tuesday evening after the meeting.

“We really feel like we don’t know when there’s going to be redundancies, and the threat of that hanging over us all the time, it’s very worrying. You can’t help but worry, because it’s our jobs, and it’s our livelihood,” Ms Slavin said.

“We’re staff, we’re not just numbers that produce content and administration and all that kind of stuff. We love this organisation, and we love working here, most of us want to continue working here, but we don’t know, we really don’t know.”

Emma O Kelly, chairwoman of the NUJ’s broadcasting branch in Dublin, noted a “subdued” atmosphere among RTÉ staff as they absorbed the implications of the new strategic plan. “People have a lot to think about, they want more information.”

She spoke of concerns among staff regarding an increase in outsourcing to independent production companies, the planned cut of 400 jobs and the wider consequences for the creative arts and media sectors.

“More programmes are going to be privatised, put into the private sector – that means more people working with precarious contracts, working for three months at a time, unable, for example, to get mortgage approval, going on holidays not knowing if they’ve work when they come back.”

Ms O Kelly welcomed the news that salaries at the broadcaster would be capped at €250,000. “This is close enough to the position we’ve had for a number of years.”

Kevin Reynolds, an employee at RTÉ Drama on One, said morale at the broadcaster was still “through the floor”, but said he had faith in Mr Bakhurst’s approach. “We’ve been badly served by management and successive regimes of management in this organisation, but I think there’s a lot of faith in Kevin personally,” he said after the meeting on Tuesday.

Séamus Dooley, secretary of the NUJ in Ireland, called on the Government to honour its commitments to public service broadcasting, in light of the new RTÉ strategic plan.

“There is still a degree of uncertainty in relation to Government funding,” he said after the town-hall meeting. “RTÉ, as a public service broadcaster, is very important to democracy, and it is important that it is given this sort of priority.”

Mr Bakhurst said about 150 people were due to retire over the coming four years, which would cover part of a planned reduction of the staff numbers by 400 under the plan. He also told staff the broadcaster had no plans to sell 2FM, while Lyric FM was a “really important part” of its public service remit.

During the meeting, he said the scandal that erupted after RTÉ’s failure to properly disclose Ryan Tubridy’s pay had brought its financial crisis “to a head”, but the broadcaster was obliged to make cuts because successive governments had repeatedly declined to tackle licence fee reform in an era of runaway inflation.