Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to correct something that was said earlier, but I am not making a big issue of it. It was said that the agent, NKM, has four or five RTÉ staff, but if we look at the website, I estimate that there are 20 people from RTÉ on the books there. I think Ms Ní Raghallaigh should know that. It is a big number of people. I am not making a big issue of it.

I will move on. A former Minister for communications, Dermot Ahern, who was Minister in 2002, and the then Taoiseach met with Bob Collins and Cathal Goan, who was managing director of television at the time. The purpose of that meeting was to discuss the debt of €20 million and they were seeking a significant increase in the licence fee.

The Government granted quite a lot of the increase that was sought, and it was very unpopular. Let me quote directly from an article Mr. Ahern wrote last Monday in a national daily newspaper, the Irish Daily Mail:

As a result of that meeting, it was agreed in principle that - in exchange for a major restructuring of how RTÉ did its business, from a financial, governance, and operational point of view - the Government would consider a substantial increase in the licence fee, which was €107 at the time. Over the subsequent months, officials in my department, aided by outside experts, conducted a forensic examination of the overall situation in RTÉ, particularly from a financial point of view.

The results of this deep trawl threw up some astounding revelations.

For instance, we learned that RTÉ had actually been paying a full salary to 11 employees which it didn't realise were still on its payroll, [This is the killer line for RTÉ.] despite them having left RTÉ years earlier.

The running of RTÉ at that time is described as "chaotic" by the then Minister. Can the officials inform me today whether there are still people on the payroll who are not in RTÉ?