Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will stay where we are at the moment. I read the documents but they were too late. It was insulting to the committee and to the staff. It did not go down well. However, I found the documents quite compelling and a very strong rebuttal. Those were some of my initial thoughts. It is beginning to fall apart a bit. RTÉ and the DG are obviously watching this. The statement issued by RTÉ this morning is astonishing. If the DG is not watching this, somebody should tell him to look at whoever issued this and how it was issued. The witnesses have provided documentation, in fairness to them, relating to the side payment or side deal. The email from Breda O'Keefe in RTÉ states that "we can provide you with a side letter to underwrite this fee for the duration of the contract." That evidence is compelling to our committee. It quite obviously completely contradicts the evidence given previously by RTÉ. They are totally opposite. That is a big tick mark on the side of Mr. Tubridy and Mr. Kelly.

However, on the other side there was no 20% drop in salary, in real terms. To say so has no credibility whatsoever. It has zero credibility, given the €75,000 and the different payments. It is quite obvious it was absorbed in a different way. The second issue, which involves a huge amount of credibility, is that Mr. Kelly must have said about 15 times that he was acting under instructions from RTÉ relating to the payment processes. The first payment goes through Noel Kelly, one of his companies. That is to Renault for the first year. The second ones are to Astus through CMS. Why the switch over?

Here is the real issue. I have emails coming in to me from all of these Nigerian cousins saying I have won they lotto. They instruct me to do x,y and z. I do not do it. I think Mr. Kelly has serious accountancy issues here. I think his companies have serious accountancy issues here based on the evidence being given. This is not how companies behave. They get instructions to pay an anonymised unknown company for something that is then referred to as consultancy fees, under a contract that has been negotiated with RTÉ for private work outside, and then switches from Noel Kelly to CMS for the second and third years.

None of this is credible. It does not stand up so that is where Mr. Kelly's arguments fall down.

I want to pose some questions. Mr. Kelly mentioned Mr. Tubridy took a 20% drop in salary. I am looking for short, sharp answers purely because of time; I am not trying to be rude or anything. I think all of us here know that this is this is not accurate. Was Mr. Tubridy doing the same number of hours on all the shows? Are we comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges? Was there a change between 2015 to 2019 and 2019 to 2023 regarding Mr. Tubridy's hours of work? We can then correlate how much of a drop in pay there really was based on hours worked.