RTÉ spent nearly €57,000 sending 41 staff members to Prague to cover the Republic of Ireland’s World Cup qualifying match against Czechia, correspondence between RTÉ and the Oireachtas reveals.
“This coverage was provided on a cost-competitive basis,” RTÉ’s head of public affairs wrote in an email, seen by The Irish Times, to Committee of Public Accounts chairman John Brady (Sinn Féin).
RTÉ senior executives are expected to appear before the committee in the coming weeks, before it enters summer recess on July 16th.
According to the email, two people from RTÉ’s commercial partnership team also travelled to the Czech capital to work “on sponsorship of both match and live radio programmes and social media content”.
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The broadcaster spent €56,756 on travel to Prague, accommodation and expenses, with the expenses portion amounting to €3,343.88, and “were subject to managerial approval”.
The average cost per person was €1,384, noted RTÉ’s Vivienne Flood when writing to the committee chairman on June 18th.
She defended the cost on the basis of “the significance” of the story: “Given that this was the first time that Ireland had sought to qualify for the Fifa World Cup since 2002, there was a strong public interest in this match,” she wrote.
Previously, only a cost estimate was known for sending a 21-person-strong radio team to cover the football match in March that ended in Ireland’s last-minute defeat in penalties.
Appearing before an Oireachtas media committee in May, RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst said: “It was probably about €25,000 to send them, all in.”
He added: “On the radio side alone, that game drove so much commercial revenue that it more than paid for the people we sent. We actually made a profit on sending those teams over there.”
Flood wrote in her email of a “significant uplift in radio listenership” on the night in question.
“RTÉ Radio 1 also saw a huge lift in digital listening that night. The key 8pm-10pm period was up 120% for listeners versus the previous day,” she wrote, adding that “post 10pm also saw huge increases, with gains of 268% versus the previous day”.
The coverage on RTÉ2 was watched “by an average of 1.37 million viewers ... making it the most-watched programme of the year so far on TV in Ireland.” The match also brought considerable traction to RTÉ Player, with a record-breaking 1,059,000 streams, according to Flood.
She said viewership peaked at 1.6 million at 10:34pm – “just as Czechia sealed victory with the winning penalty”.
These statistics “demonstrate exceptionally high public interest in this event, with audience needs effectively met across the coverage”, Flood wrote.
She concluded her email to the committee chairman by saying: “The overall approach to coverage was ultimately decided on by a number of senior editorial leads ... with the full support of the Director General”.
