Popcorn at the ready. Those who revelled in watching the RTÉ soap opera on their television screens in 2023 now have an opportunity to revisit the whole debacle in book form. Shane Ross brings a sharp eye to the controversy over barter accounts, clandestine payments and the Toy Show musical.
The book opens with an extended profile of Ryan Tubridy - “RTÉ’s fallen hero” - but Ross reserves most criticism for Moya Doherty and Dee Forbes, respectively board chair and director-general, during the years covered by the scandals. Ross, a long-time newspaper columnist and former government minister, concludes that in the Doherty-Forbes era, “rules were allowed to languish, and the deficit became chronic”. It’s difficult to disagree with his assessment. He correctly highlights the flawed strategy of “betting the bank” on a licence fee increase and using “megaphone diplomacy” to pressurise the political system into handing over more funding.
The book takes a sideways swerve to past controversies from the 1960s onwards, including claims that the Workers’ Party was determining editorial policy, especially about Northern Ireland. Most readers will race through these pages and welcome it when the book returns to more recent times.
Ross does, however, relay a telling anecdote about an exchange with Eoghan Harris in Sachs hotel in 1982. Harris, an RTÉ producer and leading activist with the Workers’ Party, presented the then senator Ross with a “beautifully crafted, perfectly typed speech” that he wanted him to deliver in the Seanad. Harris added it was his ambition to get Ross (then also a stockbroker of the laissez-faire economic school) to join the Workers’ Party. When Harris departed, Ross ordered another gin and pushed the speech aside.
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The final chapter includes extracts from an interview with Kevin Bakhurst, RTÉ’s director general. Ross notes Bakhurst’s “rousing, bullish vision of the future”. It will take another book to judge the veracity of that statement and the credibility of RTÉ’s current strategy. The Government’s €725 million bailout of RTÉ runs to the end of next year. What then? The decades-old debate about a reformed funding model for Irish public service media remains unresolved. The only certainty is continued competition for audiences and advertising from super-rich global media giants.
Kevin Rafter is professor of political communication and head of the School of Communications in DCU and author of a forthcoming history of Magill magazine
