Terry Prone: It's not even the beginning of the end of the Ryan Tubridy affair

There are still two things to tie up in this controversy. Will more witnesses from RTÉ be compelled to appear before another Oireachtas committee and what is Ryan Tubridy’s future with the broadcaster?

Ryan Tubridy has welcomed the latest Grant Thornton report, stating his belief that “any fair assessment” of the findings will help him re-establish trust with listeners and colleagues. Picture: Colin Keegan

Good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. The RTÉ payments story had a beginning and a middle. Anybody who thought the latest Grant Thornton report would provide the end will have been disappointed. We’re still stuck in the middle.

Good stories also have a villain, a moustache-twirler who can be keel-hauled when judgement is made. It helps if the story also has a hero who is accused of belonging in the moustache-twirler department but is exonerated and carried shoulder high back to the palace.

We’re missing that bit, too.

Oh, and one other thing we’re still short of is motivation. Now, anyone who thought Grant Thornton were going to identify why on earth named individuals did weird accountancy stuff before it all blew sky-high missed the point. Grant Thornton are forensic accountants. Not dramatists or novelists or even journalists. 

They deal in the concrete and make judgements about the figures: this was correctly stated, that was incorrectly stated. It would be a bridge too far to ask Grant Thornton how on earth top management released false figures, what they were trying to achieve by skating skillfully around the truth and how this aligns with the values taxpayers are entitled to believe inform the actions of our national, state-supported public service broadcaster.

Only one thing is clear, and that’s a fact about someone who had no hand, act or part in the skewing of the statistics. That someone being Kevin Bakhurst. Remember him? The guy implicitly criticised by an anonymous politician recently for not getting this sorted out quicker?

Him. You have to hand it to him. Bakhurst has a genius for conveying extreme urgency while holding back on actual speed, which is pretty much a basic characteristic of a great manager. This led a number of commentators to predict, more than a month ago, that he would finalise Ryan Tubridy’s contract the following week. Didn’t happen. Was never going to happen. That contract is still — rightly — up in the air, Bakhurst — rightly — waiting until after the issuance of this latest report before ending the negotiation dance with Tubs.

Just how the report influences the new DG’s thinking will emerge as time goes on.

What Grant Thornton make clear is that figures known to be inaccurate were published by RTÉ. In the financial scheme of things, those figures weren’t enormous. But the breach of public trust is the same whether the national broadcaster knowingly misled the public about €50 or €50,000. The transparency failure lies in the intent to mislead rather than the scale of the misleading amount.

That Grant Thornton can’t speculate about motivation incentivizes rather than discourages the rest of us to do so. 

The figures gave the impression that Tubs was getting less than half a million a year when he was getting more than half a million a year. No evidence has been found to suggest that Tubridy pushed for or insisted on an arrangement that led people outside RTÉ to assume he was taking bigger pay cuts than in fact was the case. Nor was he ever accused of that.

He himself has welcomed the report, stating his belief that “any fair assessment” of the findings will help him re-establish trust with listeners and colleagues. Those colleagues matter.

Bakhurst has always indicated that the attitude of the RTÉ workforce matters. Not in the sense of any employee or group of employees having a veto on the employment of any presenter, but in the sense of collective betrayal on the part of RTÉ, people who took cuts that in some cases were life-changing and lifestyle-diminishing, wrongly believing that the star presenter was commensurately impacted. 

It is fair to assume RTÉ people will see Ryan Tubridy as exonerated from direct involvement in the chicanery of which Grant Thornton has found the station guilty. It’s also fair to assume RTÉ people will not see him as out of the woods: OK, RTÉ did weird stuff. But why didn’t Tubridy, knowing the figures being read by his paymasters (viewers/listeners) and by his station colleagues were inaccurate, correct them? 

He himself has portrayed the issue as an internal RTÉ accounting error. But qui bono? His colleagues may legitimately ask who gained from that error and how a man regarded as fundamentally decent and likeable could have gone along with it for so long.

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On Tuesday, voices on radio were teeth-grindingly dissatisfied with the new report, because it didn’t tie up the issue the way they wanted it tied up. The steps to final tie-up are two-fold.

First, we’ll get to see if the confident noises about witness compellability made by Oireachtas committee chairs mirror the reality. Can someone like Dee Forbes, if she offers those committees sick certificates signed by doctors, be forced nonetheless to pitch up in Leinster House for a grilling? I wouldn’t want to stick my neck out, but the chances are between slim and none.

The second issue is Ryan Tubridy’s broadcasting future with RTÉ. About which one certainty exists: the time intervening between Ryan’s appearance before the Oireachtas committee and now has powerfully strengthened Bakhurst’s hand.