RTÉ can expect no more than €16m in additional budget funding

The troubled broadcaster’s new director general Kevin Bakhurst had previously suggested that RTÉ would need €56m in exceptional funding to cover the holes in its balance sheet. Picture: Liam McBurney/PA Wire

Media Minister Catherine Martin says that RTÉ can expect no more than €16m in additional funding in Tuesday’s Budget, with any further funding dependent on receiving a comprehensive future strategy for the broadcaster.

The troubled broadcaster’s new director general Kevin Bakhurst had previously suggested that RTÉ would need €56m in exceptional funding to cover the holes in its balance sheet.

However, addressing the Oireachtas media committee, the Minister said that any additional funding would be dependent on her Department having full sight of a “robust” and fully costed future plan for the station.

Ms Martin told the committee repeatedly that she would not allow RTÉ to fail, citing the importance of public service broadcasting in general.

She told members that she had extended the remit of the forensic accountants delving into the history of RTÉ’s controversial barter account so that the pending reviews will stretch back to the inception of the account in 2012, as opposed to the previous starting point of 2017.

Those extensions will not affect when the final reports from those investigations will be delivered – that is sometime towards the end of December or the start of January 2024 – though Ms Martin acknowledged that the cost of the review conducted by Mazars may increase slightly.

Asked what had changed in terms of the barter account, which became notorious for the frivolous nature of much of the expenditure incurred using it, Ms Martin said that while still being used, it can now only be “cashed out”, while the non-commercial discretionary expenditure it had been used for – for items such as flip flops – has been discontinued.

Ms Martin said that successive governments have “failed to grasp the nettle” in terms of how that funding should be provided. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

The Minister said she is of the opinion however that, while trust in RTÉ has been severely damaged by the scandal surrounding hidden payments to presenter Ryan Tubridy, conversely “in a strange way the value of public service broadcasting has only been strengthened”.

In terms of the future funding model for RTÉ, in light of the collapse of licence fee income in the wake of the payments scandal, Ms Martin said that successive governments have “failed to grasp the nettle” in terms of how that funding should be provided.

“This will not be the Government that fails in this, this will be the Government that delivers,” she said.

“The tables have turned,” she said regarding RTÉ’s expectations in terms of its funding she said, in that the broadcaster “now expects conditionality” concerning any funding they may request.

Asked if she still has faith in the board of RTÉ given the ongoing scandal, Ms Martin noted that many of the issues predate the current chair Siún Ni Raghallaigh, adding that when the issue of hidden payments first arose last March it was the board which escalated that revelation into a full-scale investigation.

“It was under their watch this was discovered,” the Minister said.

Ms Martin said, of the fact that the resignation of former director general Dee Forbes had been requested by Ms Ní Raghallaigh without the Minister being informed, that had occurred due to the chair’s genuine concerns in terms of “due process and individual rights.

The Minister reiterated her belief that Ms Forbes, who has been absent from the public eye citing ill health since her resignation in June, should appear before committees to address what has happened at RTE once her health permits her to do so.

She said, in terms of RTÉ’s liability owing to its historical use of bogus self-employment contracts, that she has had no sight of what that total figure, rumoured to be many millions of euro in value, will be.