Cianan Brennan: RTÉ in need of a good tuning if it is to garner public support

For the broadcaster’s plea for a taxpayer bailout to be taken at face value, it needs to face up to how it managed to misclassify so many staff, writes Cianan Brennan

A key strand of the meeting was Dee Forbes’s performance under questioning as to whether or not RTÉ would back-date entitlements such as pension contributions and maternity benefits missed out on by workers found to be bogus self-employed.

The appearance of RTÉ’s director general before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week displayed the contradictions writ large of the broadcaster’s seemingly never-ending quest for more taxpayers’ cash while at the same time, treating some of its own employees as disposable commodities.

The station’s financial woes are not exactly a secret. It is hard to remember the last time RTÉ wasn’t strapped for cash, or having to undergo cost-cutting measures, or selling off its land, or running voluntary redundancy programmes.