After months of turmoil, Kevin Bakhurst’s rescue plan for RTÉ comes as the national broadcaster risks running out of money. The crunch could hardly be more serious, threatening insolvency by the spring. But the loss of public confidence presents an even greater problem. After a summer of scandal, today’s financial crisis is the direct result of licence-holders refusing to pay the annual fee. The collapse in licence income is forecast to cost €20 million this year and €40 million in 2024.
All of this is a dire reflection of a serious credibility gap in RTÉ that money alone cannot fix. Because of the row over Ryan Tubridy’s payments and all that followed it, the national broadcaster has become a byword for rampant misgovernance and corporate waste. But the Government has made clear it will not allow the organisation to collapse, hence confirmation on Tuesday that RTÉ will receive an interim bailout of €56 million from the State this year and next.
That is a huge financial package by any standard, sufficient to ease the immediate peril, assuming RTÉ can convince the Government that order is being restored in the organisation.
But the overriding imperative must still be to revive RTÉ’s credentials as an institution devoted to seeking out and telling the truth, not least about itself. If that cannot be done, RTÉ has no future as a public service broadcaster. The bailout buys time and scope to start repairing the reputational damage, but reputation cannot be bought off the shelf. Public trust must be earned. A precious commodity, it is all too easy to squander.
Will Bakhurst’s plan do the job? The director general’s manifesto is but one piece of a wider jigsaw, a key strand of which is the elimination of 400 jobs, roughly 20 per cent of the permanent staff. Although staff departures are supposed to be voluntary in all cases, this stands as confirmation that RTÉ’s workforce will be required to bear large costs for management and board mistakes. It must be noted that RTÉ has set targets in the past for voluntary departures that were not met.
But job cuts may not end there. Many RTÉ contractors not on the permanent staff, who work hard behind the scenes on big programmes, are fearful they will be let go when contracts expire. That suggests the ultimate toll on jobs may well be greater than the mooted 400, people with the least protection being easier to dismiss than permanent staffers. It is no surprise that workers are unhappy.
There is more. The cost of redundancies is likely to come in at €40 million, so the bulk of the bailout will be spent reducing the number of people working for RTÉ. That will be cast as the cost of survival. But it still seems like the very opposite of actual investment in public broadcasting, much of which is set to be privatised anyway as RTÉ moves to increase spending on independent producers by 50 per cent by 2028.
It should be clear also that the public bailout is a burden on all taxpayers. That includes those who actually paid the licence fee year after year – and paid it again this year even as extraordinary revelations from Montrose sent shock waves through the political system. Supercharged “talent” pay at RTÉ never sat well with politicians and the people they serve. There was worse to come with disastrous “slush fund” disclosures about lavish corporate hospitality and lax internal controls, leading to feverish criticism of RTÉ and its culture.
Bakhurst’s plan assumes costs can be cut by €10 million next year – partly by eliminating some services such as RTÉ Pulse and RTÉ 2XM – and that part of the highly valuable Donnybrook campus can be vacated via the sale of land or other commercial use. It also assumes more production can be moved to Cork and other regional locations. That might please local politicians but such moves would come with costs in their own right for RTÉ.
All of this is but the first course on a menu of initiatives to overhaul how RTÉ conducts its affairs. In the backdrop are two Government-mandated reviews of its internal operations.
The first of these reviews, chaired by Prof Niamh Brennan of UCD, is examining RTÉ’s governance framework. She has powers to recommend changes “to ensure robust public accountability” and to “deliver a more open, transparent and accountable organisation”. That means further change is inevitable, change the Government will probably impose on or require of RTÉ to ensure its continued support for the rescue plan.
The second review, chaired by employee relations consultant Brendan McGinty, is examining how RTÉ engages presenters and contractors. The remit includes “fees, the use of agents, the impact on costs borne by RTÉ and the governance of same”. Recommendations to the Government on that front could well hasten moves to cut top presenter pay.
The high drama phase is over. Now comes the counting – and allocation – of costs.
