Is it too Late Late to rescue Ireland’s public broadcaster from its pay scandal?

Are the higher-ups and top-rated “talent” at the BBC following the shenanigans at the Irish public broadcaster RTE? I should imagine they are. They certainly should be. 

At one level, what looks to have happened is simple enough. Ryan Tubridy, Ireland’s highest paid and arguably most trusted radio and television presenter, was paid €345,000 (£300,000) off the books between 2017 and 2022 on top of his published earnings over the period of close to three million euros. I mean, who hasn’t at some stage creamed off seventy-five grand a year in extras to make ends meet in hard times?  

But, believe me, all of Dublin, from the Taoiseach and ministers all the way to the staff at Arthur Mayne’s bar just down the road from the corporation’s Donnybrook headquarters, is talking about nothing else. Dee Forbes, RTE’s first-ever female director-general, resigned yesterday, and since the news broke last Thursday not one, but two parliamentary enquiries have  been launched to discover exactly what was going on and who else, other than Forbes and Tubridy, should carry the can.  

It might strike Reaction readers that the amounts at issue, though high, are not startlingly so. Bankers, corporate CEOs, movie stars and Premier League footballers would scoff over the small change aspect of the so-called scandal. In the UK, the BBC pays Graham Norton around three quarters of a million pounds a year, while in America Stephen Colbert, the host of the Late Show, receives annual “compensation” from CBS of $25 million. As it happens, all three are Irish (or in Colbert’s case of direct Irish descent), but that is by the way. So were Eamonn Andrews, Val Doonican, Terry Wogan and Dave Allen, and don’t tell me that any of these fine gentlemen ever pulled a fast one just to cushion their bottom line. 

For Tubridy, the fallout has been catastrophic. Less than a month ago, Ireland wept copious tears as he presided over his last-ever Late Late Show, the country’s most watched television programme, on which everyone who’s anyone, from Tom Cruise to Paul McCartney to Joan Collins and Hillary Clinton, has appeared down the years. The farewell to “Tubs” was a national celebration. Though it was unclear why the host, just a boy of 50 and looking to be in fine fettle, had decided to give up such a prestigious slot, it was a relief to discover that he would be continuing with his five mornings a week radio show, kicking off each time with his spin on the big news of the day. 

Alas, Tubridy was pulled from his show on the Friday morning (his spin would have made riveting radio), and it now looks as if he won’t be returning to RTE in any capacity, even as the early morning weatherman. Don’t be surprised if he grows a beard and takes to wearing a hoodie, for Ireland’s number one broadcaster has opened his last supermarket. 

In the meantime, his many radio and TV colleagues have been lining up to declare that their incomes, as published in the official accounts, are entirely kosher, with no hidden extras. Each of them has laid stress on the fact that while they may, it is true, earn three, four and five times the Republic’s average earnings – currently around €45,000 a year – they are one-hundred-percent honest and open and concerned only to provide value for money in these troubled times. 

That is not, needless to say, how things are seen in the nation’s bars or by office workers struggling to keep up with soaring food prices and ever-increasing mortgage payments. Nor is it the way the situation is perceived by RTE’s remaining employees, who have seen their earnings stagnate in recent years as one cost-cutting regime has given way to another, and another, in the name of financial prudence. 

Into this nest of vipers (possibly the only snakes not banished by Saint Patrick) are about to step Patrick Kielty, the Northern Ireland-born comedian, as the new host of the Late Late Show, and Kevin Bakhurst, a BBC veteran, as the new director-general. 

Kielty was a surprise choice to replace Tubridy. Though a successful standup with a big following in the UK, he has to overcome the fact that he is a “Nordie” who has never lived in the Republic and will have to persuade viewers over time that he is one of them, not one of us. 

Bakhurst won’t have it easy either. He is not exactly a new broom. He was head of news in RTE for four years, from 2012 to 2016, and even served briefly as acting DG when big money for those at the top was not exactly a rarity. On the plus side, the job he is leaving in order to move to Dublin was that of group director for content and media policy at the UK regulator Ofcom. So he may just know how bodies are buried in the broadcasting world and who are most likely to have put them there. 

The lasting tragedy for Tubs is that he may not now be able to use the clubs given to him last month as a farewell present by top Irish golfer Padraig Harrington or the motorbike ridden onto his final Late Late as a gift from Bono and The Edge. As for Dee Forbes, the poor woman says that she isn’t feeling well enough to answer questions from politicians about her stewardship of the national broadcaster. The pair of them, one imagines, just wish that the rest of us would calm down and switch channels.   

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