Cianan Brennan: Media Minister Catherine Martin is very lucky to still be in her job

We've yet to have a minister fall on their sword over the madness at RTÉ

Media Minister Catherine Martin managed to pull a new controversy out of thin air by throwing former RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh under the bus during an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan on Prime Time last Thursday. Picture: Stephen Collins/Collins Photos

The main takeaway from a sullen, exhausting Oireachtas committee meeting with Media Minister Catherine Martin is that the minister is very lucky to still be in her job.

The general view ahead of the hearing in Committee Room 2 was that Ms Martin had managed to pull a new controversy out of thin air by throwing former RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh under the bus during an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan on Prime Time last Thursday.

Serious questions remain over the minister’s judgement in relation to that appearance. 

Why did she not pull out of the interview given things were still up in the air with the RTÉ chair? 

Or why didn’t she give a holding statement when it became clear she was to be asked about the issue of her being allegedly misinformed about the RTÉ board’s signoff of exit packages for former executives Richard Collins and Rory Coveney?

From the get-go the minister was on the backfoot at yesterday’s hearing, and while the earnestness of her answers seemed quite legitimate, the adequacy of them was another matter.

She said that she didn’t pull out of Prime Time because the interview had been “prearranged” and it would have been “too late” to do so.

Those answers were met with incredulity by her interlocutors.

Politics and the media are cynical games. Interviews are pulled out of constantly. It is the way of things.

If the minister were to be taken at face value then she must be the least tactical politician imaginable.

She told us that she got to Montrose and immediately told the Prime Time officials that she was open for questions regarding the breaking story. Fair enough. 

But then she said that she couldn’t have predicted that she would have been asked if she had confidence in Ms Ní Raghallaigh.

What on earth did she think was going to happen? Has she literally paid no attention to any other political controversies in her life?

She said that in responding to the confidence question she had done “everything” she could to not say that she had no confidence in the RTÉ chair.

This had been necessary, she said, as it was important to be “transparent” and “to tell the truth”.

Important for Ms Ní Raghallaigh perhaps. 

For Ms Martin, the stakes are a little different. Her priority should be making sure her Government doesn’t fall.

Were she to lose her job over this utter shambles, and she easily could have, we’d be straight into snap election territory.

We did get some new information, such as that Ms Ní Raghallaigh had “indicated” that she would have resigned if she had received a formal letter from the minister over the debacle, and that a one-to-one meeting that Friday would not have been appropriate.

Revelations such as that suggest that in reality Ms Ní Raghallaigh, a woman who has been under stupendous pressure in dealing with a crisis not of her own making for the past 15 months, had little or no respect for her minister, despite Ms Martin’s assertion that she “would have said” that the relationship between the two was “good”.

It begs the question. To date we’ve had a chair, a director general, a commercial director, a director of strategy, a chief financial officer, a top-paid broadcaster, all fall on their own swords as a result of the madness at RTÉ. We’ve yet to have a minister.

After Tuesday evening’s hearing, it is hard to credit how that is still the case.