Inside RTÉ: rats, redundancies and shattered morale

The rats have scurried back to the RTÉ canteen, oblivious. The broadcaster’s main staff restaurant was shut again this week “as a precaution”, and to allow for monitoring of the drains. During the summer, exterminators found droppings, smear marks and a chewed cable. The mood on campus among its human occupants is drolly said to be “sub-optimal”.

Recurring rodent activity – this was the third canteen closure of 2023 – is far from the only woe triggering a queasy outbreak of déjà vu at Montrose.

Roiled by the aftershocks of a hidden payments scandal at the top of the organisation, and exhausted by a longer-term cycle of cuts, controversies and labour rights sagas, anxiety levels among the RTÉ workforce are as high as the masts that transmit its services.

Despondent staff say they are “crushed”, caught in the middle of a senior management team swamped by reports and a prevaricating Government they believe is exploiting the crisis, using it as a stick with which to beat RTÉ.

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On Wednesday, Minister for Media Catherine Martin admitted there was a €21 million gap between what the Government was prepared to give RTÉ and the amount it needs to fund its existing services, after a post-scandal collapse in licence fee receipts.

This places immense pressure on Kevin Bakhurst, RTÉ's director general since July, to find substantial “cost efficiencies and cost savings”, as Martin termed the cuts expected to be the meat of his strategic plan.

Hours before the Minister confirmed the expected shortfall, rank-and-file staff as well as some of RTÉ's best-known presenters packed out Studio One for a “town hall” meeting. With the small studio unable to fit in everybody who wished to attend, employees also listened in via Microsoft Teams and RTÉ's live internal video feed.

Bakhurst, flanked by director of human resources Eimear Cusack, reiterated that there will be no compulsory redundancies at RTÉ, which employs more than 1,800 people, but added that it must become “a smaller organisation”. Amid uncertainty about what this means, he is said to have tried more than once to wrap up the meeting, only for more questions and contributions to pour in.

Journalists are concerned about RTÉ's cut-through in a crowded, tumultuous news landscape where people increasingly source information from algorithm-driven social media apps

One speaker was Beta Bajgart, the current holder of the Fair City stills photography contract, who spoke of her upset at the public denigration of her profession last month by a smartphone-wielding member of the Oireachtas media committee.

Another speaker was a former “bogus” self-employed contractor – one of the workers found to have had their employment status misclassified by RTÉ – who outlined the inferior terms of the job she was subsequently offered.

Her account was “very disheartening”, one attendee said. Another attendee, however, noted that the general feel of the almost two-hour meeting was less angry than the fraught town hall held in November 2019 by Bakhurst’s predecessor, Dee Forbes.

For its part, RTÉ management reports “very positive” feedback. Communication with employees “will remain central going forward”, a spokesman says, and will include a meeting next week between Bakhurst and a newly created staff engagement group, a further town hall meeting with all staff in early November and ongoing dialogue with the RTÉ Trade Union Group.

But “ordinary workers”, as the union describes them, or “the innocents in all of this”, as Martin has called them, are deeply aware of the troubling maths. Without the €16 million due to be allocated in the supplementary Estimates, and the €40 million in further interim funding recommended by Government advisers NewERA, RTÉ will be insolvent by spring, according to Bakhurst.

RTÉ staff are dismayed that this €40 million has been made contingent on cutbacks, and that a €345,000 under-declaration of Ryan Tubridy’s pay looks set to lead to a multimillion-euro shrinking of the broadcaster that includes voluntary redundancies.

“We would certainly like to see the NewERA report, and on what basis they are saying RTÉ should come up with €21 million itself,” says Emma O Kelly, who chairs the Dublin broadcasting branch of the National Union of Journalists.

A recruitment freeze has been announced by Bakhurst, with the only hires being roles deemed mission-critical, such as the streaming media engineer job now being advertised and a replacement for chief financial officer Richard Collins, who resigned earlier this week.

The freeze has yielded a foretaste of the burdens that could afflict those who stay, with Bakhurst telling the Oireachtas media committee last month that if RTÉ has fewer employees in future, it will not be able to continue its present level of output because of “the stretch that staff are under”.

His own morale appeared to flag on Thursday, during an appearance before the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), at which his sincerity was attacked in the course of demands that RTÉ act in ways that are contrary to its own legal advice.

“My words are not meaningless and empty,” he responded to Independent TD Verona Murphy, who had alleged they were.

Martin will “thoroughly investigate” Bakhurst’s strategic vision alongside Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe when they receive it, she said at her Budget 2024 press conference.

Asked about both the resignation of Collins and the decision of The Late Late Show’s executive producer Jane Murphy to leave the revamped programme (with new host Patrick Kielty) in just its fourth week on air, the Minister said it was not for her to comment on individuals.

At Montrose, staff are agog at the tensions that have spilled over at the Late Late. Murphy is understood to have left the entertainment department because she was not given the autonomy that the person helming the flagship chat show would usually receive, with group head of entertainment and music Alan Tyler, a Scottish former BBC executive who joined RTÉ in May 2022, instead exerting control over guest line-ups and the format of interviews.

The atmosphere in the news and current affairs division is more subtly strained these days. Journalists are aware that their role is acknowledged to be at the heart of RTÉ's public service remit. But they are simultaneously concerned about the organisation’s cut-through in a crowded, tumultuous news landscape where people increasingly source information from algorithm-driven social media apps such as TikTok.

Impossible budgets, punishing workloads, industrial relations tussles, double-digit gender pay gaps, absent career progression opportunities and underinvestment in technology are not unique to RTÉ. These issues are endemic in the Irish media.

If RTÉ, mindful that most applications to its 2021 voluntary exit scheme were refused, opens a new scheme by the end of 2023, it will join two of its news competitors in doing so this year. Belgian-owned Irish Independent publisher Mediahuis launched a redundancy scheme in March, and The Irish Times is poised to seek departures.

Among the programme-makers who fill much of RTÉ's television schedule and who have also suffered as a result of chronic media underfunding, there is a feeling, too, that as dismal as Donnybrook might sometimes seem, it’s got nothing on the precariousness of life outside it.

One independent producer recalls an RTÉ executive complaining about losing his parking space during the recession – a time when the independent commissioning budget was halved from €80 million to €40 million.

Another content maker says the broadcaster’s involvement is regarded by the creative sector as detrimental to the production of good work, attributing this to a “toxic” institutional culture: “In RTÉ, everyone is trying to anticipate what someone else senior to them might want.”

Financial pinches at RTÉ are not new. “I remember when it was: ‘Oh, there’s no money, don’t be asking for money, it’s all going to [hosting] Eurovision’,” says a former employee.

But the hurt and frustration openly expressed by demoralised RTÉ workers was a marked feature of the early days of Tubsgate. The staff rallies held on campus then seem unlikely to be the last.