Ryan Tubridy, the former Late Late Show presenter, has not repaid RTÉ a sum of €150,000 he received as part of a controversial payment deal in 2020 that was not disclosed publicly, RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst has confirmed.
Ryan Tubridy was to be paid a total of €225,000 over three years by RTÉ as part of a deal brokered by him, his agent Noel Kelly and the station in 2020. He agreed to participate in three corporate events for Late Late Show sponsor Renault in return for the payments. The payments to Mr Tubridy were not disclosed publicly by the broadcaster until 2023.
The payments formed the centre of the scandal, which resulted in Mr Tubridy, RTÉ’s highest-paid presenter, leaving the station that year.
At the Oireachtas Media Committee, Mr Bakhurst was questioned about the payment by Pádraig O’Sullivan of Fianna Fáil and confirmed that Mr Tubridy, who now works as a London-based broadcaster for Virgin Radio UK and Q102, has never made the repayments.
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The sums were processed through a barter account, which shielded the payments from public view. Mr Tubridy did participate in one promotional event for Renault, but the second and third events did not place.
Asked in 2023 should Mr Tubridy repay the €150,000 fee for those events, the director general said that on a legal basis, it might not be available to recuperate. Mr Bakhurst has also said there was a “moral case” for Mr Tubridy to make the repayment.
At the height of the controversy over the “secret payments” in 2023, Mr Tubridy indicated that he would be willing to repay the money should he return to RTÉ.
The payments were nominally made by Renault but RTÉ underwrote all three, totalling €225,000, and effectively paid Mr Tubridy. The sums were not classified in the broadcaster’s annual accounts as salary payments.
The broadcaster’s head of news, Deirdre McCarthy, told the committee that the cost of a TV advertisement promoting the work of RTÉ’s newsroom amounted to €77,000 plus VAT – a total of €94,000.
The advert has been the subject of recent media reports following the leaking of information that actors had been employed to pose as journalists, and that props had been used.
Mr Bakhurst and Ms McCarthy were highly critical of media coverage of the TV adverts.
Ms McCarthy said there had been “factual inaccuracies and misinformation, and a lack of context” in media reports. She told the committee, chaired by Labour TD Alan Kelly, that the adverts featured the daily working lives of three prominent RTÉ journalists, one of whom is Europe editor Tony Connelly.
A request had been made to the management of the news division to allow some journalists to feature in the advert, as background ‘extras’. Ms McCarthy said it was decided that journalists would not be taken away from their daily duties. Therefore, extras had been hired but they had been shot out of focus and appeared blurred.
“A lot of the misinformation has come from a leak to the media of an internal editorial meeting last [week],” she said.
Earlier, Mr Bakhurst told the committee that reports of props being brought into the newsroom were incorrect. He said that other than two plants having been taken from another part of the building into the newsroom, there were no props.
Mr Kelly told Mr Bakhurst that the public think the advert is “bananas” and it has “annoyed a lot of people”.
[ RTÉ confirms €3.6m write down on partly abandoned IT projectOpens in new window ]
RTÉ executives were criticised by several committee members, including Joanne Byrne, Sen Alison Comyn, Sen Garret Ahearn, and Malcolm Byrne, for only disclosing in March this year that there was a €3.6 million impairment on a new ICT system that was partially abandoned in 2020.
Mr Bakhurst confirmed he had only become aware of the impairment more than a year into his term. Asked why he was not told earlier about the impairment, Mr Bakhurst said RTÉ was a big organisation.
“We are trying to clear the stables,” he added, saying that he had disclosed a number of other issues for the broadcaster that had come to light in recent times, including its admission that it repaid €2.7 million in total (including fines) to Revenue for payments made under the Covid-era Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme to those who were not eligible.
