Eamon Dunphy has revealed he once asked RTE to slash his fee by €30,000 in 2009 as he thought he was being "paid too much".
The sports pundit, 77, was being paid €300,000 at the time for hosting a radio programme on RTÉ Radio 1 as well as being a pundit on RTE Sport.
However, he told The Tonight Show on Virgin Media One that he requested a 10% pay cut during the recession after he saw how friends and family were financially impacted.
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Speaking about his decision to call up RTE's former Director General Noel Curran and ask him for a pay cut, Dunphy said: "In 2009, I thought I was being paid too much and I rang Noel Curran, who was the head of RTÉ at the time and I said ‘I want to take a 10pc cut’, which was €30,000.
"And I took it, because I was looking all around me in my family and at my neighbours at the suffering. I thought it was too much."
The former RTE pundit now hosts his own podcast, The Stand, and said he was earning about €300,000 from RTE at the height of the recession
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He continued: “I had the radio programme, which was doing very well, and the football, but it was too much in my opinion."
"Now Ryan Tubridy was earning €170,000 in 2011, these are different times.
"The point I am making is this - sometimes you need to do the right thing, because as everyone knows, you are nothing as a high earner, as a personality, as a journalist... you work for the people and without the trust of the people, you are nothing.
"And that's what I did, if you multiply that €30,000 over the next five or six years when I was in RTE, that is quite a sum of money.
"The reason I mention this is not to make myself look good but to contrast this grubby little stroke at a time of Covid, when people are losing their jobs, their business and everything, with my attitude."
