Grant Thornton report reveals extent of Toy Show musical's failings 

The Grant Thornton report revealed that the RTÉ board barely interrogated the project of ‘Toy Show: The Musical’ before its production. It also showed that there was a further €69,000 in losses attributable to the show. Picture: Andres Poveda

Yesterday, a reeling RTÉ belatedly published its top earners for 2022.

It was interesting to see the now departed Ryan Tubridy’s salary officially given as being €515,000 for that year, as opposed to the €440,000 which was once the official line.

In other words, a secret €75,000 payment made to Mr Tubridy via a UK-based barter account for his services that year — which effectively ended the man’s RTÉ career — is now a matter of public record.

It may have been hoped at the higher levels in Montrose that the publication of the top earners would have forced last week's Toy Show: The Musical fiasco into the rear-view mirror.

No such luck. We had known previously that the ill-fated December 2022 show had lost €2.2m in a run that lasted barely over a month, which is quite catastrophic.

Following last Thursday’s publication of a Grant Thornton review of the matter, we now also know that the RTÉ board barely interrogated the project ahead of its production. That the masters of the organisation were presented with the musical as a ‘fait accompli’ by their subordinates, despite the overwhelming risks which accompany such a venture.

We know that there were a further €69,000 in losses attributable to the show which had not heretofore emerged.

Most damningly, we know that RTÉ boosted its low sponsorship receipts by €75,000 — yes that figure again — via a form of creative accounting, to make up for the fact that only €45,000 had actually been pledged, only for the entry to be quietly reversed in the aftermath of the Tubridy scandal breaking last June.

The last revelation is scarcely conceivable in its brazenness. Nevertheless, Grant Thornton wasn’t able to come up with a rationale for how or why it ever even happened.

As for the who of it, the whole report was anonymised in the interests of “fair procedures”. So we know that something dreadful was allowed to happen, and that is it.

In these circumstances, despite their receiving the Government’s shaky backing last week, it’s very difficult to see how RTÉ’s board members survive this.

Five of them were in situ when the project was being brought to fruition. One of those, Anne O’Leary, is chair of the audit and risk committee which managed to never officially review the musical, a €4.1m project, and its chances of success before the fact.

By contrast, members of RTÉ’s executive board have been exiting the broadcaster at a rate of knots since the current spate of scandals began to emerge last summer. director general Dee Forbes, chief financial officer Richard Collins, and head of commercial Geraldine O’Leary, all gone.

Former head of strategy Rory Coveney meanwhile also departed after the musical’s losses were revealed last July. All those exits, yet the full board has announced it will be staying on in the wake of the Grant Thornton report. 

They may be staying for the moment, but whether they’ll survive the coming inquisition regarding the mess at the hands of the Dáil Public Accounts and Media Committees, well that’s another matter.

There are other conclusions to be taken from the report.

Initial response 

For context, it’s worth having a look at what RTÉ was saying about the musical immediately after its run when suggestions that it had flopped hard were beginning to gain purchase.

At the time, in January 2023, the Public Accounts Committee had requested the musical’s business case and expenditure.

In response, Ms Forbes, the only person not to engage with the Grant Thornton report due to her ongoing health issues, wrote: “No doubt the Committee will appreciate that RTÉ as a commercial semi-state must protect its commercial interests. RTÉ does not disclose the costs and revenues of individual creative or commercial projects, whether they be TV dramas, sports events, or a live event such as Toy Show: The Musical.”

Ms Forbes’ note was accompanied by an 8-page briefing document regarding the musical, which waxed lyrical about its genesis and creative team, of the fact RTÉ was “very proud” of the show, and about how such ventures were necessary given RTÉ was then losing €65m per year in lost licence fee revenue.

No mention was made of the musical’s losses, even though they were clearly already known. The closest the note comes to any sort of acknowledgment of the calamity that had just befallen is in the sole admission that “audiences were lower than we had hoped for”.

In the ensuing weeks, all requests from the media for data regarding the musical’s performance were rebuffed.

Six months later, the Oireachtas committees, in parsing the Tubridy scandal, asked for details of the musical’s financial performance. In response, the same detail-free Dee Forbes briefing document was delivered.

The following week, on July 13, the sheer scale of the losses was finally divulged to the committees in a terse four-page document.

There are two conclusions to take from that narrative. One, Dee Forbes needs to speak on the record as to what has happened at RTÉ. When she is well enough, it is imperative that happens, it is past time that she provided some real answers.

The other conclusion is that the culture of treating the taxpayer like an ignoramus that persists at RTÉ needs to be eradicated. And to that end, the current board will surely have to go.