For practical reasons, books about RTÉ have always lagged slightly behind their subject. John Bowman’s Window and Mirror: RTÉ Television 1961-2011 is a formidable work of institutional history, but one produced, in the nature of commissioned histories, in close partnership with the organisation itself.
John Horgan’s Broadcasting and Public Life is a rigorous overview of the news and current affairs division up to 1997. Robert Savage’s A loss of innocence?: Television and Irish society, 1960-72 excavates the difficult early decades.
The logical next step was to connect RTÉ’s long-standing institutional pathologies to the specific scandals that engulfed it in 2023. The argument that what happened then was not an aberration but the logical terminus of 60 years of governance failure is the central proposition of Shane Ross’s new book, RTÉ: Saints, Scholars and Scandals.
The book’s well-argued thesis is that the scandal that broke in June 2023, when it emerged that the national broadcaster had been systematically misrepresenting the earnings of its star presenter Ryan Tubridy while those at the top failed to carry out due diligence or oversight, was not the product of a single unfortunate lapse in judgment. It was part of a culture that had been allowed to form across decades of inadequate oversight, political interference and institutional deception.
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Ross points to the tradition of ministers appointing political lackeys to the RTÉ board and authority who were temperamentally and professionally unsuited to the task of holding management to account. When Todd Andrews was installed as chair by Seán Lemass in 1966, his primary mission was to ensure the still-new TV station did not embarrass the government. The pattern had been set.
Ryan Tubridy is Andrews’s grandson, and Ross misses no opportunity to lay out the various connections between the parallel hierarchies of the Fianna Fáil party and RTÉ. The most startling of these are the letters he unearthed from Gay Byrne to Charles Haughey, which suggest a relationship both more intimate and more sycophantic (on Byrne’s part) than might have been previously realised.
Through his long chapter on Byrne, Ross also traces the origins of the culture of the untouchable star presenter, in which a handful of individuals accumulated leverage so great that the institution became afraid of them. The Tubridy arrangements were merely an updated, systematised version of the same instinct to placate the talent which had become embedded when Byrne was in his pomp.
These are reasonable arguments, well made by an author whose background in politics and media makes him well qualified for the task. It’s hard to quibble with his forceful criticism of former chair Moya Doherty in the years before the scandal broke.
But the book has gaps that Ross does not seem to notice, despite having talked to a string of former directors general and broadcasting ministers. The governance debate keeps circling a question that nobody has yet answered convincingly. What is RTÉ actually for now? Ross is understandably sceptical of the platitudes often offered in response to that question, and sympathetic to awkward-squad veterans such as Bob Quinn and Lelia Doolan, who have been asking it since the 1960s.
Perhaps the answer is that there is no satisfactory answer. The Reithian model of the BBC, which forms one strand of how RTÉ conceives its mission, is under competitive pressure and political attack in the UK and may not survive. The more commercial North American model, favoured by successive ministers who resented what they saw as excessive demands for more public money from a broadcaster they believed to be infested with their political enemies, is in terminal decline. There is only one direction of travel for television and radio advertising revenues, and it is not upward. What Ross fails to do is push that question to its conclusion, and as a result his implicit case for a reformed RTÉ rests on foundations he has not examined.
The book ends in cautious optimism about the Kevin Bakhurst era. Governance structures are more robust and a degree of institutional self-awareness appears to have replaced the previous omertà
The governance failures are serious, but they and the existential question are not the same, and treating the first as if resolving it will resolve the second is a comfort that the evidence does not support. A reformed, well-governed RTÉ that has not worked out what it is for in the 21st century is still an institution in serious difficulty.
Ross spent nearly four decades in Leinster House, and many of the named sources he spoke to for this book are, like him, former members of the Oireachtas. They think about RTÉ primarily as a public institution to be governed rather than a media organisation competing for an audience. That perspective shapes what the book sees and what it misses.
For example, RTÉ’s staffing structures and its internal cost base have attracted sustained criticism for decades from those who believe the organisation has been far too slow to address practices that would be unsustainable in any comparable private-sector media business. And other media organisations have argued for years that RTÉ, in receipt of both licence fee income and commercial revenue, occupies an unfairly dominant position in the Irish market. Ross spent the best part of his career as a business journalist taking aim at comfortable, sheltered incumbents. His lack of interest in these critiques is surprising.
The book ends in cautious optimism about the Kevin Bakhurst era. Governance structures are more robust and a degree of institutional self-awareness appears to have replaced the previous omertà. But the multiannual funding settlement agreed in the dying days of the last government has, if anything, further weakened the arm’s-length principle and opened the door to even more political interference in the future.
Ross may have written the definitive account of how RTÉ got into the mess it was in. The question of how it gets out of the deeper mess it is still in remains, for now, unwritten.
