What I learned from working in RTÉ and elsewhere: It’s not conspiracy, it’s incompetence

I worked in RTÉ as both a researcher and presenter on various television shows, where I learned many things: mostly to do with programme making and storytelling. But I also learned the importance of charm. TV shows are dependent on – and often stymied by – the technical requirements. Can we get a camera crew or editing or studio time or a particular widget to do a particular thing? There were many such issues, and the answers to those questions usually lay with someone in another department who would, most likely, say no: because they were not given enough notice or the right form hadn’t been filled in or only a person with a specific title could make such a request.

That’s where the charm came in. On one show in particular we had a team member who was one of those people who not only knew everyone, but also had an innate knowledge of how RTÉ worked. He could spot the potential bureaucratic or technical blocks to any idea, but invariably knew the person to talk to about it. He’d float out of our office and find the person and almost always manage to wheedle what we needed out of them: and all done in the most good-humoured way.

It was a rare and wonderful gift, and I wish I had it; though it did teach me that plámásing is always more effective than antagonism. I also wish that I had managed to develop even a morsel of his understanding of how the place worked. Yet in over a decade – the 1990s into the early 2000s – a lot of it remained mysterious to me. I had meetings with managers and afterwards had no idea why the meeting had taken place. People often seemed to speak in a code that I didn’t understand.

Over time, I came to regard RTÉ not as one organisation, but many. It was more like the European Union: the many components agree on a general set of aims but to achieve those goals required constant negotiation; even, occasionally, for one department to flex its muscles. Sometimes a branch of the organisation would have input into areas not under its remit at all: seemingly because it was regarded as powerful and should not be ignored.

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This is not unusual for any large company, but it didn’t do much for transparency. In my experience, people would often waste inordinate amounts of time speculating on what various department heads were “up to”. The main canteen was often rife with gossip.

Again, much of what I’m describing here is not that unusual. You’ll find it in broadcasting organisations and insurance companies. It’s what happens when human beings work with other human beings. And I’m not describing this to you so as to join the long list of people queuing up to give RTÉ a kicking. I owe RTÉ a lot. I made some lifelong friends there, and I met many brilliant people.

That sense of being embattled was always there, to a greater or lesser extent. Even when RTÉ dominated the media market, there was a curious mixture of arrogance and insecurity; of being the only “real” broadcaster while being terrified of what outside media would say about it.

All of these factors – plus the fact that media people are natural gossips – seemed to contribute to an atmosphere that generated not quite paranoia but light conspiratorial thinking. Yet the speculated-upon plots rarely happened.

I met some great managers in RTÉ, but others were more concerned with projecting an impression of scary aptitude rather than actually owning those qualities; who, perhaps, liked others to think they were up to something.

I eventually moved on to do other things and often encountered similar issues, such as the problem with internal promotion: you can be a great carpenter, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be great as a carpenters’ boss. The most important thing I learned in RTÉ, which I think applies to most areas of life: in the vast majority of cases, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s incompetence.