Book review: An important look at failures

The snouts-in-the-trough scandal around Gay Byrne’s successor Ryan Tubridy’s pay was the catalyst for Shane Ross' fast-paced book

Shane Ross does not offer a prescription for the next iteration of RTÉ in his book. Picture: Dan Linehan

• RTE Saints, Scholars and Scandals
• Shane Ross
• Atlantic Books, €16.99

Public service broadcasting is one of the sheet anchors of the liberal democracies that have sustained Europe for just over 80 years.

In this post-truth age global public service broadcasting is, just like many liberal democracies, under threat in a way unseen in, well, 80 years.

Flummoxed, in RTÉ’s case, by collapsing and uncertain revenues, inept and indifferent internal and external management, corporate insecurity exacerbated by sycophancy, tremendous hubris and greed, too many of the organisation’s woes are of its own making. 

A lack of clarity about the RTÉ’s purpose — is it a social or a commercial entity? — adds greatly to that vulnerability.

In Shane Ross’s telling the organisation, like many traditional media, sometimes seems like Lot’s wife — frozen in time longing for an all-but-gone Sodom as it struggles to hold ground in an ever-more diverse communications landscape.

It is not hard to imagine that the organisation misses a recent past when Gay Byrne was the dominant figure in Ireland’s evolution.

Though it’s nearly 30 years since he hosted The Late Late Show his legacy resonates in today’s scandals, at least those where greed and leverage coalesce.

He was not shy about maximising the rewards he could win from our national broadcaster whose management had sleepless nights wondering if he might abandon the Montrose mothership.

He was so good at it that he established a culture where, as Ross does repeatedly, personalities in a modest, regional broadcaster are described as “superstars” and paid accordingly.

One of the interesting and unrecorded threads in the book is the publication of some of Gay Byrne’s correspondence to Charles Haughey. 

To describe those letters as sycophancy invests a depth in the word it simply does not have. 

They are the pleadings of a cringing supplicant and though Byrne benefitted from the relationship he did not go to Haughey’s funeral.

The snouts-in-the-trough scandal around Byrne’s successor Ryan Tubridy’s pay was the catalyst for this fast-paced book.

It was a shabby, disheartening episode for nearly everyone involved and like Byrne’s letters to Haughey, Tubridy’s testimony to an Oireachtas committee was so self-serving that it created an impression he may never shake off. 

The same fate awaits Dee Forbes and Moya Doherty who, despite the stardust greeting their appointments, were excoriated in the Brennan report albeit in the most ladylike language.

Ross does not offer a prescription for the next iteration of RTÉ. How could he? If he had one, he’d be the next Murdoch or Turner, maybe the next Musk or Bezos.

The frightening thing is that that map has yet to be designed — or controlled — and at a time when belief can be as much an emotional exercise as a series of rational deductions, liberal democracies must endure the slings and arrows of unhinged online commentary.

There is little enough for supporters of public service broadcasting to cheer in this important publication unless they embrace the latest promises of reform and renewal at RTÉ — an exercise only the most optimistic might grasp.

They may take a smidgen of comfort, however, in the idea that it seems all too possible that any other semi-state organisation subjected to such a rigorous review might be equally bruised.

This is an important book as it highlights failings any sentient Irish person was aware of but did nothing to resolve.

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