Ryan Tubridy is a dead man walking. After over a week of the scandal - with more damning detail revealed every day - it’s clear there is no way back to his career in RTE.
It would be kinder to put him out of his misery now, instead of letting him linger in what his radio show stand-in Oliver Callan called: “Tubridy purgatory.”
It’s an awful shame because Tubs is a well-liked figure the audience feel they know personally.
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We were only toasting him on his 50th birthday, half of those years spent on the telly and wireless, last month.
Ironically, this affinity makes the betrayal feel worse. But he is the architect of his own downfall.
And he’s brought the entire RTE organisation down with him.
He’s always said he isn’t a “bread head”, but if he really was conveniently in the dark about his salary, he shouldn’t have been.
As a functioning adult, it’s a basic responsibility to be fully informed on your own finances.
The station’s top star, and self-elected conscience of the nation, taking secret €75,000 top-ups on yearly earnings from the State broadcaster was terrible to begin with.
He’d publicly taken a salary cut, and basked in the kudos of that, while behind the scenes it was being handed back to him in a sleeveen move.
But since his fall from grace last week, things have gotten worse for Tubs.
Government grillings have revealed it was “possible” he knew about the audit ahead of his shock decision to suddenly quit as host of the Late Late Show, the biggest job in Irish television. This past week has seen fellow RTE stars like Miriam O’Callaghan, Joe Duffy and Claire Byrne line up to say they were not getting any such clandestine payments.
So it wasn’t some widespread crypto-culture in RTE he could say he was just one part of.
The secret set-up just for Ryan was “an act designed to deceive” according to the station’s own chairwoman Siun Ni Raghallaigh.
The extra money, hidden from his public salary, was billed as “consultancy fees” by Tubridy’s agent, Noel Kelly.
Chief financial officer Richard Collins said the payments involved “concealment” and “deception” and said in his view, the taxpayer may have been defrauded.
Meanwhile, the Late Late Show replacement Patrick Kielty is making everyone else look like dog dirt on a shoe by stating his €250,000 salary publicly and paying his own travel expenses.
The big question remaining is why on earth did RTE Director-General Dee Forbes sign off on this arrangement? Why did all this have to happen, for the sake of what probably amounted to around €40,000 a year after tax to TV’s highest-earner, already on close to half a million?
Did anyone stop and say: hang on, why are we doing all this again?
The only ones who can answer that are the group of three at the centre of this: Ryan Tubridy, agent Noel Kelly and recently resigned Director-General Dee Forbes.
They should make their voices heard at the Public Accounts Committee.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said they should.
And the committee is considering the unprecedented step of using its powers of compellability to make them.
Tubs is heading for the RTE exit door, it gives me no satisfaction whatsoever to say that.
I think he will be badly missed.
But his path to redemption lies in being totally honest with the public about what happened and why it happened.
