PAC to question RTÉ executives after original testimony 'blown out of the water'

Senior members in RTÉ, including new director general Kevin Bakhurst, have been asked to attend PAC on Thursday afternoon where they will be grilled on the discrepancies around who knew what and when. Picture: Niall Carson/PA

RTÉ must explain significant contradictions between the accounts given by it and those given by Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly when it comes before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday.

PAC members, who on Tuesday quizzed the former Late Late Show host and his agent for three hours, said senior RTÉ executives now have serious questions to answer as newly uncovered documents blow their original versions of events “out of the water”.

Politicians also feel that Mr Tubridy used his appearance at the committee to speak to “a different audience” and that he did not fully engage with members, leaving much of the explaining to his agent.

“I think their function was to come in and get him back on the air and undo some of the reputational damage and our function was to put together the jigsaw, they are not necessarily the same thing,” said one member.

Another member described Mr Tubridy’s contribution as “very performative”.

PAC chairman Brian Stanley hit out at numerous people, including Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly, who he said have tried to escape all blame when they appeared before his committee in recent weeks.

'Thrown under a bus'

“The number of people who have been thrown under a bus at this stage, I think we are losing count,” said Mr Stanley in calling on RTÉ to provide full details in its next appearance.

Senior members in RTÉ, including new director general Kevin Bakhurst, have been asked to attend PAC on Thursday afternoon where they will be grilled on the discrepancies around who knew what and when.

“RTÉ once and for all needs to start answering everything because if they don’t this is going to drag on for a long, long time,” said Labour’s Alan Kelly.

Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy said email correspondence provided to PAC by agent Mr Kelly “completely blows out of the water” the versions provided by former RTÉ chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe around the decision to underwrite the controversial Renault deal.

Mr Kelly on Tuesday said that blaming former RTÉ director general Dee Forbes solely for the decision that RTÉ would underwrite Mr Tubridy’s contract with Renault was “incorrect”.

He also provided PAC with an email in which Ms O’Keeffe stated, “we can provide you with a side letter to underwrite this fee for the duration of the contract”.

Ms O’Keeffe last week claimed that a request to underwrite the controversial tripartite agreement with Mr Tubridy and Renault had been shot down by RTÉ.

“My recollection is that Mr Tubridy’s agent requested that the commercial agreement be underwritten by RTÉ, and this was refused,” said Ms O’Keeffe.

She said that this continued to be her position until her departure in March 2020.

Ms Murphy said: “There’s new conflicts in the information we got. Obviously, those conflicts are going to be put to the people who will be coming into the PAC on Thursday because there’s certainly some things that are totally at odds with what we’ve been told before.

The two of them can’t be right, so the record of the Dáil is wrong, and that is not a minor detail.

“The other thing was that Geraldine O’Leary [former RTÉ head of commercial] couldn’t remember who decided on all of this, yet the information we got today makes her a central player in all of that.”

Green Party TD Marc Ó Cathasaigh said: “I think at the end of today there’s more questions for RTÉ to answer than there is for Ryan Tubridy.”

He said committee members had been “gobsmacked” to read the emails about the underwriting of the deal.

“It had always been implicated that Dee Forbes was the key decision maker and nobody else knew that this underwriting deal, that was blown asunder by those documents.”

However, he said that Mr Kelly did not provide a satisfactory explanation for the way in which invoices were raised for the payments made to Mr Tubridy as part of the tripartite deal.

Meanwhile, it has been reported that RTÉ could sell off its Montrose campus in Dublin.

Mr Bakhurst told the Irish Independent that the possibility of selling off parts of the RTÉ campus or leaving it altogether “could be” considered.

Asked about leaving the campus, he said: "That was an option — an expensive one. It could be [an option in the future]. It’s very disruptive and it’s very expensive. Long term, it’s quite exciting but I don’t think it was a runner just because of the price tag."

RTÉ first moved to the Donnybrook complex in 1961.

He also said he does not "see any case" for selling off RTÉ 2FM.