RTÉ pay crisis: what will Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly be asked this week?

On Tuesday, RTÉ presenter Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly will appear at two back-to-back Oireachtas committee hearings. Both hearings are highly anticipated and politicians will be hoping to get greater clarity around why Tubridy’s pay was misstated over a number of years.

They are scheduled to appear before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) at 11.30am. At 3pm they will appear before the media committee for three hours. In correspondence to Tubridy and Mr Kelly, PAC chair Brian Stanley outlined a number of broad topics that committee members will be hoping to cover.

1. What payments were made to Tubridy between 2017 to date?

Politicians on both committees will want to know what extra payments Tubridy received above and beyond his published salary from 2017 to date, and they will also likely ask about any payments pre-2017. The presenter’s earnings were €56,000 higher than disclosed in 2020, €50,000 higher than publicly stated in 2019 and 2018, and €20,000 higher in 2017. Tubridy will also certainly be asked why he never flagged it to RTÉ that his published salary figures were less than he was actually earning.

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2. Details of Tubridy’s contractual relationships with RTÉ, including related payments and exit fees

The issue that prompted the review of Tubridy’s earnings were payments of €150,000 made to the presenter by RTÉ, linked to a deal with a commercial partner, Renault. But politicians will also want know about any exit fees which may have been due as part of Tubridy’s contract. The RTÉ programme Prime Time reported last month that the only additional payment due in Tubridy’s 2015-2020 contract with RTÉ was an end-of-contract payment of €120,000. RTÉ told an Oireachtas committee that the €120,000 loyalty bonus was not paid, however. “However, for an unexplained reason, that €120,000 was credited against his earnings between 2017 and 2019. That is under investigation at the moment by Grant Thornton,” RTÉ's chief financial officer, Richard Collins, said last month. TDs will seek to have this explained.

3. The process relating to the “tripartite agreement” including its negotiation and sign-off and why it was underwritten by RTÉ

The tripartite agreement is the agreement between RTÉ, Tubridy and Renault. Mr Kelly will be asked about the finer details of this arrangement: why was it suggested, who came up with the idea and why was it considered necessary. Tubridy will be asked what instructions he gave his agent around this agreement, while Mr Kelly will be asked about RTÉ's decision to underwrite the agreement and why this was considered necessary. In the same vein, they will also be asked about a Microsoft Teams meeting on May 7th, 2020, between Mr Kelly, former RTÉ director general Dee Forbes and an RTÉ solicitor in which a verbal guarantee was given that RTÉ would underwrite the commercial contract. The presenter’s agent will be asked also about the invoices for the two €75,000 payments, specifically whose idea it was to label the invoices as being for “consultancy fees”.