Fintan O’Toole: The only thing Tubridy seemed truly sorry for was himself

For Ryan Tubridy, sorry was not the hardest word. He used expressions of regret for his part in the RTÉ debacle fluently enough.

It was just the meaning behind the words that he seemed to find difficult. The only thing he managed to seem truly sorry for was himself. Perhaps it says something for his guilelessness that he was not even able to convincingly fake contrition.

Like it or not, a scandal like this one demands catharsis. Tubridy’s aim was to “move on” and that is obviously the aim of RTÉ's new director general Kevin Bakhurst too.

The two men thus had a mutual interest and that ought to have led to a resolution in which Tubridy and his employers both managed to look humble and chastened. The problem was that, for reasons that remain hard to fathom, Tubridy just could not pull off that look.

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Maybe he hasn’t been thinking straight. It is easy to understand how disorienting the sudden reversal of his fortunes must have been. He went, overnight, from being RTÉ's golden boy, a princeling virtually created by in vitro fertilisation in the Montrose labs, to being its bad boy.

This nemesis was not entirely the result of his own hubris. It was RTÉ management that created the mess he was plunged into – ironically by being so obsessed with cushioning its darling from the station’s own financial realities.

It’s not hard to see how confusing it must be for Tubridy that it was the very people who cosseted him most who, in the end, did him most harm. The ghost at this feast of folly is still the invisible former director general, Dee Forbes, who has yet to account for any of it.

As the second Grant Thornton report made abundantly clear, it was RTÉ management, and not Tubridy or his agent, who decided to misreport his earnings for 2017, 2018 and 2019. While his were sins of omission – not publicly correcting those stated figures – theirs were sins of commission.

[ Cliff Taylor: Understanding the two sums of money that were Ryan Tubridy’s downfall ]

[ Did Kevin Bakhurst make the right call in showing Ryan Tubridy the door? ]

The problem is that Tubridy could not decide whether to be sorry for those sins or not. We know what his gut instinct told him because in June, when RTÉ owned up to the deception, he dismissed any need for contrition: “I can’t shed any light on why RTÉ treated these payments in the way that they did nor can I answer for their mistakes in this regard.”

Then, realising that this was a disastrous failure to read the room, he did a screeching U-turn: “I should have asked questions at the time and sought answers as to the circumstances which resulted in incorrect figures being published. I didn’t, and I bear responsibility for my failure to do so. For this, I apologise unreservedly.”

Good. Unreservedly – absolutely, completely, no ifs, buts or maybes. Whether he meant this or not, it was obviously the right way to go.

Three stages

At that point, Tubridy and whoever was advising him seemed to have in their heads at least a rough map of his road back to being a popular RTÉ presenter. In every possible charting of that course, it had three stages.

First, accept that the Renault deal through which RTÉ paid him €225,000 was plain wrong. Second, pay back the money. And third, stop spinning incredible explanations.

But, bizarrely, he point-blank refused an invitation at the Oireachtas hearings to agree that a transaction featuring false invoices and a secretive London barter account was wrong. The best he could manage was that “It strikes me as being unorthodox.”

Second, while he volunteered to pay back €150,000, it became clear that he has not yet done so and may not now do it.

And third, most damagingly, he has stubbornly stuck to the line that the Renault deal, which was negotiated by RTÉ, underwritten by RTÉ and entirely paid for RTÉ – in other words by the Irish public – was not an RTÉ payment but a private arrangement between himself and Renault.

That was the import of his statement on Wednesday that “my actual income from RTÉ in 2020 and 2021 matches what was originally published as my earnings for those years”, a claim that could be true only if the “Renault” money were not, as it undoubtedly was, income from RTÉ.

He was not, in other words, moving on. He was holding stubbornly to a fiction, so stubbornly indeed that it seems possible that he might actually believe it.

These dramas don’t work like that. You can’t walk away from a scandal while you are still doing a Lanigan’s Ball dance of sorry/not sorry.

Bakhurst was right to sense that there was going to be no catharsis, and therefore no closure, while the protagonist was insisting on circling back to the source of the scandal to proclaim his own innocence. And without that closure, RTÉ's future remains in doubt.

For reasons that remain elusive, Tubridy decided to be the anchor that kept RTÉ chained to the bottom of some very murky seas, weighed down by his still-seething resentment. He should have known that therefore the organisation could not sail on without first cutting those chains. It leaves him, for now, apparently still looking back, more in anger than in sorrow.