Justine McCarthy: Ryan Tubridy should keep his job, but not his role

Despite his “enormous” salary, Ryan Tubridy has been underselling himself. The broadcaster’s marathon appearance in Leinster House on Tuesday may have failed to convincingly explain why his €75,000-a-year top-up payments were elaborately disguised, but it did crystallise how he has been shortchanging himself for years.

Tubridy arrived at the Oireachtas committee rooms sporting his trademark Tintin quiff and professional persona that insists life’s a hoot, seeming to think he could win over the politicians with his impeccable manners and patriotic novenas, while leaving all the complicated, grown-up stuff to his agent, Noel Kelly. But, as the hours dragged on and his declarations of undying love for Ireland and its children grew increasingly unctuous, what became crystal clear is that this man has been trapped in the rut of fame for too long.

Tubridy is primarily popular for his cheery banter. What we learned on Tuesday is that there are more layers to him than just a predilection for mom, apple pie and the Beatles. He is capable of anger and self-pity, an urge to imperiousness and a cognitive range exceeding his cardboard cut-out image. It makes him more interesting.

While we have begun to see a different side to the presenter, protests by RTÉ workers have shown the audience something else – there are plenty of people on the network’s payroll who are articulate and personable. Anecdotally, it is evident that the education correspondent, Emma O’Kelly, has been a revelation for many spectators. It was a behind-the-scenes worker called Kevin Brew, a radio producer, who leapt from the shadows of national obscurity during Wednesday’s protest when he spoke about a “hyper-commercialised cult of celebrity [in RTÉ] that does cartwheels to deliver rock-star fees to the upper tiers of the organisation”.

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This is the nub of the whole fiasco of camouflaged payments and creative accounting involving Tubridy. The capitalist market has a horrible maxim that, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Pay them “enormous” amounts of peanuts, though and you get performing stars. RTÉ has been grooming Tubridy to be a star since soon after he started shaving. It has made him rich and so famous that he cannot step outside his front door without encountering fans and the odd critic. Not all his colleagues would be willing to sign up to that.

As somebody who has been appearing on television since he was 12, maybe he thought he could swing it with his performance

He told the media committee that, while his RTÉ pay is “enormous”, it hasn’t affected his soul. But it has, clearly. His handsome remuneration has made him the public face of the State-owned broadcasting service. The strong affinity between RTÉ and the people, which still survives, is often channelled through him. That’s a pedestal that can give one notions and, in recent years, Tubridy had developed a de Valera-esque habit of speaking “on behalf of the entire country” when interviewing guests on his television show, and, like a Fáilte Ireland clapboard, cajoling them into saying Ireland is wonderful.

These presumptions made it all the more humiliating that, in an attempt to keep his job, he found himself auditioning before two Oireachtas committees and a countrywide television audience glued to the spectacle in homes, offices and pubs. As somebody who has been appearing on television since he was 12, maybe he thought he could swing it with his performance but, this time, the performance was incidental to the substance. His and Kelly’s protestations that his lavish top-up payments were entirely the business of RTÉ and Renault, and nothing to do with them, were implausible.

Fianna Fáil senator Shane Cassells recalled Adrian Lynch, RTE’s acting deputy director general, previously saying that negotiations for Tubridy’s new five-year contract stalled in the autumn of 2019. The following February, Breda O’Keeffe, then the chief financial officer, told Kelly in writing that RTÉ was progressing discussions with a commercial party which would involve a €75,000 payment to the presenter. “This was the sweetener to make sure the contract was signed,” Cassells deduced.

Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy aptly called it the Nuremberg defence when Kelly, self-described as “only five-foot-six”, maintained he was just obeying monolithic RTÉ’s orders when he invoiced a British company he had never heard of before for “consultancy fees” with no mention of Tubridy. That splashing sound in the background came from shoals of meme fans on social media searching for the scene in Jaws when two boys fake the fin of the killer shark in the sea. When confronted with an armed patrol, one of the pranksters yells: “He made me do it.”

This is the tide in Tubridy’s affairs which, according to Shakespeare, leads on to fortune if taken at the flood

At the end of Tuesday’s committee sessions, Tubridy said that, if he does return to the RTÉ airwaves, there will be “a whole new world order”. If so, it will prove to have been a crisis worth having and the network will be the better of it, if a culture of equal opportunities emerges. If news correspondents’ jobs are required to be filled by competition every five years, why not presenters’ jobs too?

The controversy may also, in time, prove to have been a defining moment for Tubridy. Recently turned 50 and no longer on television since quitting the Late Late Show in May, he has his own “new order”. He will have to grow accustomed to being recognised by strangers less often as his Late Late Show years fade into the past. He will need to acquaint himself with a smaller income too, if RTÉ allows him back on the radio.

This is the tide in Tubridy’s affairs which, according to Shakespeare, leads on to fortune if taken at the flood. He has the opportunity to reinvent himself. When he walked away from Leinster House on Tuesday evening, he left some gaping holes in his story behind him. So have others among the station’s top management. If they may keep their jobs, he should too. But it cannot be the same role. There has to be some acknowledgment, at least, of his failure to correct the public record about his earnings. A move to a different radio slot, perhaps with a books programme or one for children, would herald the new order.

If RTÉ is a better place after all of this, it will be one of the best things Ryan Tubridy has ever done for the country he loves so well.