Justine McCarthy: Tubridy is paying a high price for not exposing RTÉ's deceit

Ryan Tubridy has a lovely home. It is a mirror of its owner – congenial with no excess bulk. This I know because I interviewed the broadcaster there at his invitation in 2021 and he proudly showed me around it. Before our meeting, the RTÉ press office ordered that his house was not to be identified and required a written undertaking in advance that there would be no questions about the Montrose star’s “private life”. The day after the interview, another diktat arrived. This one said there was to be no mention of “who appears in photographs, paintings or specific book titles in his house”. I checked the calendar to see if it was April Fools’ Day.

At that time The Late Late Show presenter’s published salary from RTÉ was €495,000. Last week, the rest of us great unwashed found out that the public service station was paying him an extra €75,000-a-year, camouflaged as “consultancy” fees and paid through a British company. When I had broached the subject of his lavish remuneration, RTE’s highest-paid presenter had replied that his lifestyle was not expensive, as epitomised by the 14-year-old car he drove. “I think if I was to end up working in a bookshop tomorrow I would downsize comfortably because my needs are not outrageous,” he said.

I believe he meant it sincerely. So why did he feel the need to extract more than half-a-million-euro annually from his impoverished employer?

Ego may be a big chunk of the reason. According to the crude calculations of the capitalist market, a person’s worth is measured by the number of zeros in their pay cheque. Fame, pampering and fans may attest to popularity, but it’s your salary that places you as the top of the heap. Being in the public eye can make an ego fragile. Tubridy hinted thus when discussing critics-in-the-street he had encountered. “It’s a pity because the neediness of this job means you don’t want to elicit that reaction from someone,” he said in the interview, “and you nearly want to go to all the people who don’t really rate you or like you and say, ‘Can we have a cup of coffee because, honestly, I’m not that bad? In real life, I’m even a bit nicer’.”

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The folly of judging somebody’s worth by the size of their remuneration is a lesson Ireland has repeatedly been taught, yet never seems to learn. In fact, the Government might check its own integrity when it denounces RTE’s arrangement with Tubridy. Its deal with Robert Watt when he became the secretary general of the Department of Health with an €81,000 pay rise was equally inexplicable. In both cases, the organisations where Watt and Tubridy reign supremely-paid are blighted by under-resourcing and held together by workers dedicated to the public service they provide.

Paying the chosen ones huge salaries is a guaranteed way for hubris to flourish; the sort of hubris that made Watt think it acceptable to arrange a professorship for his colleague, the former chief medical officer Tony Holohan, at a potential cost to the public of €20 million.

It echoes the self-entitlement that led bankers on bonkers bonuses to, in the immortal words of Anglo’s David Drumm, pick extortionate numbers out of their arses and collapse the economy.

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Tubridy is paying an excruciating price now. Overnight, he has been re-cast from hero to zero. While he is blameworthy for not exposing RTÉ’s deceit about his pay, he is less the cause and more the symptom of something amiss in our financial culture.

Instead of asking why he needed so much money, the question that needs to be most urgently answered by RTÉ is why it felt the need to pay it. The explanation that he was a flight-risk from Montrose to a rival station is unconvincing. Where would he have gone in Ireland? RTÉ was his brand. When I interviewed him he said the BBC had not offered him a job but that he could have moved there, except he was too much of a home bird to leave Ireland. He quoted his late father having once said: “Poor Ryan, he’d get homesick in Greystones.”

One of the trademarks of Tubridy’s Late Late Show chat style was his incessant declarations of his love for Ireland. So frequent were these professions of patriotism that some people speculated he might be a candidate in the next presidential election. Did his paymasters ever watch the show, and muse how unlikely he was to abscond to foreign shores, or wonder if he might concede in his contract negotiations that his service to his homeland could compensate for some shaving of his salary?

The other explanation often given for his bloated pay package was the benefit to RTÉ of advertising revenue generated by the Late Late Show. There is no doubt that Tubridy is a fine entertainer and brilliant with children on the Toy Show, but he was presenting the world’s longest-surviving chatshow in television’s weekly prime time slot. How did those who approved his remuneration separate the dancer from the dance?

As he finds himself at odds with RTÉ about the legal status of his contract, Tubridy is discovering the lonely reality of the maxim that everyone is dispensable. Pat Kenny, whom RTÉ was paying over €950,000 at one stage, knows it well. When he switched to Newstalk in 2013, there were dire predictions that his old RTÉ radio slot would crumble and die. It did quite the opposite. The audience actually grew when Seán O’Rourke took over as presenter.

Politicians have been asking RTÉ bosses at Oireachtas committee meetings why Tubridy’s extra payments were concealed. The answer is obvious. Had it been known he was getting more than €500,000, other presenters, with some justification, would have demanded more in their pockets too. Until a pay cap is imposed in RTÉ, including on management, celebrity agents will continue to negotiate big bucks to bolster their clients’ self-esteem. Because, as we ought to know by now, that’s the way the money goes.