RTE presenter Ryan Tubridy and his agent have expressed a willingness to co-operate with parliamentary committee probes into the payments and governance scandal at Ireland’s national broadcaster.
A solicitor representing Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly has written to both the Oireachtas parliament’s Media Committee and Public Accounts Committee indicating a desire to clarify a number of matters and provide “important information”.
RTE has been engulfed in crisis after revelations last month that it underreported the salary paid to former Late Late Show host Tubridy and failed to disclose 345,000 euro of additional payments to him between 2017 to 2022, some of which were processed through a commercial “barter” account.
The broadcaster acknowledged the existence of further barter accounts in a statement on Tuesday night, despite chief financial officer Richard Collins telling the Public Accounts Committee last week that there was only one such account.
Senior executives from RTE are to face a grilling over the use of the multiple barter accounts as they appear before the Media Committee on Wednesday afternoon.
On Tuesday, the Government announced two separate external reviews of RTE and also moved to send in a forensic auditor to examine the broadcaster’s accounts.
Later on Wednesday, the Media Committee will ask further questions to RTE board members and executives, as well as the former chairwoman of the RTE board, Moya Doherty, and former chief financial officer Breda O’Keeffe.
RTE’s executives and board have said they will address the issue of the additional barter accounts during the session.
Fianna Fail senator Malcolm Byrne, a member of the committee, said Tubridy and his agent should appear in a public hearing.
“It’s my view that they should be asked to appear in public, I think in the same way that we have invited other witnesses to appear so that the testimony would be available not just to us who are members of the Oireachtas Media Committee, but indeed to the wider public and to licence fee payers,” he told RTE Radio One.
“We’re now moving in toward the third week of dealing with this crisis and I think the drip drip drip effect is causing huge damage to RTE and I think particularly to a lot of those who are continuing to work very hard in the broadcaster to keep programmes on air. It’s very tough on them.”
Former director general Dee Forbes quit last week amid the fallout from the scandal.
Tubridy has not presented his weekday morning radio show since the undisclosed payments were first made public.
Mr Byrne called for further resignations at the top of RTE.
“I think the only way that we’re going to see an end to the process is for people to take responsibility for their actions and we have full transparency for what went on,” he said.
Labour senator Marie Sherlock welcomed the offer from Tubridy and Mr Kelly.
“It is constructive that they have now offered to appear before the committee next week and no doubt the committee will be taking them up on that offer,” she told RTE.
RTE has provided a series of further documents to Irish parliamentarians to inform their examinations of the affair.
They include a list of the broadcaster’s top 100 salaries, all of which are above 116,000 euro, with the highest earner being paid 515,000 euro.
A letter from ex-director general Ms Forbes, written in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, guaranteeing that Tubridy would not be subject to a pay cut between 2020 and 2025 will also be scrutinised, as will multimillion-euro losses incurred by RTE’s ill-fated musical based on the Late Late Show’s annual Toy Show episode.
Since the scandal broke, much focus has centred on the workings of a UK-based “barter” account used by RTE to pay for certain services and tickets and trips related to corporate entertaining.
It was also used to pay Tubridy an additional 150,000 euro in 2022 – an amount that was not publicly declared.
At a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee last week it was revealed that the same barter account was used by RTE to pay out hundreds of thousands of euro to pay for tickets and trips to entertain clients at events like the Rugby World Cup in Japan, Ireland rugby matches in Dublin and the 2019 Champions League Final in Madrid.
On Tuesday, the broadcaster’s woes intensified when it confirmed that two further barter accounts had been discovered in a review of its files.
Ms Sherlock described that revelation as a “bombshell”.
“Really there is this sense of complete disarray within RTE now about its finances and about how it operates,” she said.
Ms Forbes has not yet appeared before either of the Oireachtas committee examinations, citing ill-health for her absence.
