Terry Prone: Why was the RTÉ director general negotiating with an agent?
Former RTÉ director general Dee Forbes says she 'did not at any stage act contrary to any advice', but has not given details as to who was giving her advice. Picture:Gareth Chaney/Collins
As the door banged behind Dee Forbes, her final statement arrived.
Most final statements attract cliches such as “closing the door”, “drawing a line”, and “putting the issue to bed".
This one actually invited door-pushing, drew no effective line, and kept the issue up and awake.
Towards the end of the statement, she apologised “unreservedly” (when will we ever see someone apologise reservedly?) for “my part in this episode".
It has to be asked why she’s apologising towards the end of a statement, the bulk of which goes to establish that she did everything out of love for RTÉ, knew her objectives, didn’t go against advice, and generally did everything right.
That brings us to one of the trailing wires in this statement. Forbes says she “did not at any stage act contrary to any advice".
What she doesn’t say is what she means. Legal advice? Financial advice? HR advice? In the interests of openness, she should name the advisers who — it would appear — happily aligned themselves with the national broadcaster playing a bogus invoice game.
Forbes states, as if it were standard, that: “I led the discussions with the agent for Ryan Tubridy.” She doesn’t explain why, as director general, she would lead out on a negotiation with a third party. Nor is it clear how often she did this, or if it was only in the Ryan Tubridy case.
That matters. One way or the other, it is mystifying as to why someone on both the executive and governing board would ever be involved in negotiations at this level. This is an example of the kind of dealmaking one would expect to be led by the head of commercial or head of finance. Or someone reporting to them. But the DG?
“At the time, we were attempting to retain Ryan Tubridy’s services,” she writes.
It is fair to wonder what exactly was the competition threatening RTÉ’s retention of Ryan’s services and how likely he was to walk in a pandemic. Especially when he repeatedly indicated he was good with taking a pay cut: we were all in this together.
Naming the competitors for his services and what they were willing to pay him would go some distance to explaining why someone at her level would get involved in a negotiation about covert €75,000 payments to Tubridy. And why she would go to the extent she went to?
Her involvement in the negotiation wasn’t just odd because of her role. It was odd because the national broadcaster set about persuading Renault to pay Tubridy privately, to hire him for three gigs at €24,000 apiece, on the basis that it would be cost-neutral to Renault.
Cost-neutral, meaning it wouldn’t cost them a cent. Not only that, but RTÉ, having done an agent’s job on behalf of Tubridy with Renault, then guaranteed that deal in a way that meant that if Renault decided it wasn’t working, RTÉ would step in and pay Tubridy: “This new commercial agreement required that RTÉ guarantee and underwrite the €75,000 annually.”
It sounds as if “this new commercial agreement” was in charge. But it wasn’t. At any point in the negotiation, Forbes could have said: “Look, this is bringing RTÉ to a place it shouldn’t be, we’re out.”
But she didn’t. Nor did the other RTÉ executives she’s invited to share her under-the-bus situation. Collectively, these executives put RTÉ in a position where if — as happened — Renault pulled out, RTÉ had to cough up €75,000 for Tubridy.
This at a time when, as she herself writes, an RTÉ executive board commitment had been made “to the board and the Government to reduce the fees paid to RTÉ’s top talent by a further 15% overall".
But then, the RTÉ negotiators covered any possible embarrassment by engaging with overseas companies to pay monies that were firewalled with anonymity so RTÉ wouldn’t look like the source.
The money is much smaller. But the episode, nonetheless, has a whiff of the planning scandal of just a few years ago.
Dee Forbes’ resignation means she doesn’t have to go in front of an Oireachtas committee on this. It complicates the lives of the RTÉ top management who have to go in front of such committees. Now that it is known that RTÉ created a situation where invoices went to a UK company for services that weren’t provided to that company, with RTÉ demanding secrecy about the whole shoddy deal, four things are clear.
The first is that the Government, in setting the terms of reference for the investigation, must ensure that it includes interrogation of how an external agent could become so powerful within RTÉ as to generate an apparently legal but covert meeting of his client’s needs.
The second is that every benefit to every RTÉ client of Noel Kelly, whether that’s a car, dinner in a hotel, a holiday, or special deal for their programme, is clinically probed.
The third is that the investigation must find out if the invoice subterfuge was unique, or used in other instances by RTÉ. If the former, why? If the latter, in whose cases?
And finally, the shield of “commercially sensitive information” would be laughable if deployed in the Oireachtas this week.
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