PAC to summon up to 10 current and former RTÉ staff as part of payments probe
Claire Byrne clarified her salary with listeners on Monday morning. Picture: Andres Poveda
The Public Accounts Committee is to call up to 10 people either employed by or who are former employees of RTÉ before it in a bid to get to the bottom of the saga involving undeclared payments to presenter Ryan Tubridy.
At a private meeting of the committee, which was joined by officials from the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, members discussed the areas of the scandal they want to probe in detail, and agreed former employees of RTÉ should be considered for invitations in order to get the full picture of what transpired.
Sources said former director general Dee Forbes, who resigned with immediate effect earlier on Monday, is “top of the list” in terms of prospective meeting attendees, despite broad consensus Ms Forbes is likely to have been advised not to attend.
“The committee has to be very careful given the Kerins judgement,” one senior source said, referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2019 that a previous Pac had acted beyond its remit in its questioning of former Rehab chief executive Angela Kerins in 2014.
A second source on the committee, however, said Ms Forbes should think twice before refusing the committee’s invitation.
“When you look at John Delaney, he did himself lasting damage by not talking,” they said, in reference to an infamous appearance by the former FAI chief executive at a four-hour Oireachtas sport committee hearing in April 2019 at which he declined to answer questions about a loan he had made to the association, a meeting which immediately preceded his exit from the association.
It is understood both the current chief financial officer of RTE Richard Collins, who took over the role in January 2020, and his predecessor Breda O’Keeffe will be among the invitees to Thursday afternoon’s special sitting of the committee.
Ms O’Keeffe had held the CFO position from September 2012 until 2020, meaning the first three years of the Tubridy payments would have been made during her tenure.
Other likely invitees include current commercial director Geraldine O’Leary, interim director general Adrian Lynch, and former chair of the board Moya Doherty, who left RTÉ last year and who said in a statement last week that the issues surrounding the payments to Mr Tubridy had only emerged as a result of an internal audit in March of this year.
“It could be a long list of people who are invited,” said a senior source. “It depends on whether or not people were in the relevant role at the time the deal structure was first agreed and put in place. If they weren’t then they can’t comprehensively answer questions about it,” they said, adding “there may well be a need for more than one meeting to deal with this”.
The Pac will meanwhile seek to extend its remit to RTÉ via the Dáil Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
Ordinarily RTÉ is not directly answerable to Pac, as its accounts are not audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General, although it routinely presents to the committee nevertheless.
Should Pac’s remit be extended, the committee could technically use powers of compellability to force the attendance of reluctant witnesses.
Meanwhile, following an emergency meeting on Monday, the broadcaster’s unions harshly criticised the situation which had seen Mr Tubridy’s salary understated by nearly €350,000 over five years.
The RTÉ Trade Union Group said there was an “unprecedented level of anger across the organisation” regarding the revelations and called on Ms Forbes to attend this week’s Oireachtas hearings.
Having accepted pay cuts in the past, having endured a series of austerity measures and a reduction in resources, RTÉ workers feel "betrayed, misled and let-down”, Cearbhall Ó Síocháin, TUG secretary, said, while calling for the full salaries of RTE's executive board to be published in full.
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