Sarah Harte: RTÉ fiasco has proven that we need systemic change, not scapegoating

Ryan Tubridy and former RTÉ Director-General Dee Forbes. 

It’s been a torrid two weeks for RTÉ, with more to come. As a rule of thumb, when you hear the word ‘transparency’ bandied around you know that there has been a marked absence of the same.

While the Oireachtas committees explored the explosive Ryan Tubridy pay crisis and other issues, the Independent Review Panel’s final report on Senior Public Recruitment and Pay Processes was published.

As this newspaper pointed out, given what is emerging about how RTÉ played fast and loose with taxpayers’ money, the timing for any announcement on the possible increase of civil servants’ pay is less than ideal.

It was the controversial pay rise given to Robert Watt, the secretary general of the Department of Health, that led to the establishment of this review group. Two years ago, when Mr Watt moved from the Department of Expenditure to Health, he had his salary boosted by €81,000, to just over €290,000.

The Government came under fire and Mr Watt who came under sustained pressure ultimately agreed to waive the raise until the economy began to improve. Early in 2022, it emerged that he had received the extra money, for how long was unclear.

The Finance and Public Accounts Committee (PAC) criticised a lack of transparency and accountability around this raise, describing it “as a very poor way to conduct business” and citing the lack of record-keeping around the process.

The review group concluded that although there are no changes for existing secretaries-general, new hires will not be given the option of an extra three years after their seven-year term is up, they will be offered another job at their previous level or a year’s pay which amounts to €250,000.

It should be remembered that we’re talking about a rare breed here with ordinary public sector workers getting 1-2% pay increases with inflation running at around 5%.

Higher up the ladder, the 36 secretaries general take home up to €250,000 (except for Mr Watt who earns more) which means they earn more than both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste.

Speaking at the publication of last week’s report, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal O’Donoghue said it was vital that a new remuneration committee (yet to be established) would provide independent advice on pay arrangements for senior posts in the public service and chief executives of commercial state bodies because without it, “we would end up in a situation where we wouldn’t have the best people to do the right work for our country”.

The ‘pay peanuts and you get monkeys’ line of thinking has an element of truth but it’s bandied around too lightly.

Then again, paying huge salaries is not necessarily a guarantee of success or of a job well done — consider some of the recent headlines around the trolley crisis, the soaring cost of the National Hospital overspend (with no end in sight), the CervicalCheck tribunal, the Kerry Camhs scandal, and the HSE cyberattack.

Clearly, not all of these calamities can be laid just at the door of top civil servants, successive ministers for health are also in the frame — but is the public getting bang for its buck?

And exactly how high do salaries have to be to attract ‘talent’?

Amanda Pritchard, CEO of the NHS, is paid just over €300,000 and presides over 1.27m workers. Bernard Gloster, CEO of the HSE, is paid €420,000 for leading a staff of 100,000.

Mr Gloster came from the State’s Child and Family Agency Tusla in March and has barely settled into the job.

This is not about doubting his ability and the scale of the challenge he faces, but there is a larger question about the sort of salaries we pay in Ireland. Too often it feels like we’re paying over the odds as opposed to getting value for value as taxpayers.

The same can be said of RTÉ. While the issue centres on the nature of hidden payments, an ancillary issue is how Ryan Tubridy’s salary was arrived at.

Tubridy is a gifted broadcaster with a long and proven track record, but who exactly was going to pay him more to go elsewhere?

The suspicion is that RTÉ ran with this fallacious thinking because they were spending public money.

We can agree that the public sector is worth protecting, it serves all citizens and not just the rich, and so, Mr Donohue is correct that we need to attract people with an aptitude for it.

However, when the new remuneration committee is deciding on potential salary hikes for top civil servants they might like to look at the package on offer as a totality considering the pros and cons of a public sector job and not just the pay.

The main thing that distinguishes high-level public sector jobs is the marked absence of risk that people in the private sector bear.

There are watertight pensions. In a world where financial insecurity is steadily rising, these perks aren’t to be sniffed at.

Impunity

Another parallel between some of the goings on in RTÉ and at the upper echelons of the public sector seems to be the impunity with which some of the actors operate.

During the pandemic, former secretary-general Niall Burgess, now ambassador to France, was embroiled in ‘Champagnegate’ after he confidently tweeted a picture of him and his unmasked colleagues drinking champagne in Iveagh house in breach of level five lockdown restrictions. He later refused to publicly answer questions over the controversy.

Plenty of people got it in the neck during covid for transgressions of social distancing rules, but the vast majority of them didn’t have the luxury of brushing it off by not answering questions.

Similarly, after the botched secondment of Dr Tony Holohan to Trinity College, Robert Watt’s appearance at the Oireachtas Finance Committee to explain the failure was marked by his point-blank refusal to accept the findings of an independent review and his palpable resentment at having to account for it.

To add to the public frustration, Tánaiste Micheál Martin proclaimed his utmost faith in Mr Watt. (This assertion is probably in part down to the fact that although he has his critics, Robert Watt is almost universally considered to be exceptionally good at his job).

However, when at the time, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar claimed the public had no interest in the affair, he was plain wrong.

The public is tired for all sorts of reasons. It’s why there is so much anger at what is being uncovered in RTÉ.

A lot of workers in the private sector and in RTÉ are struggling, many are poorly paid.

Meanwhile, those at the top of the tree are paid exceptionally high salaries, with little transparency around those payments, and a real question mark over what value for money Joe or Josephine public is getting.

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Despite the scale of the crisis engulfing RTÉ and parts of the public sector, it’s worth remembering that there are human beings at the other end.

It sometimes feels like we’re good at scapegoating individuals in this country when things go wrong, but not so good at drilling down into the details and instituting systemic change.

And that’s what is needed here.

There’s a shift under way in what the public wants and demands — which will almost certainly manifest itself in the next election.

Odds on, it’s not higher salaries for top civil servants at a time when inequalities of income are of a scale not seen in a century -and when so many of us are hard-pressed to survive.