Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 12 October 2023

Public Accounts Committee

Appropriation and Expenditure of Public Moneys by RTÉ (Resumed): Discussion

9:30 am

Mr. Kevin Bakhurst:

It has been really important and has been a priority for me and for Ms Ní Raghallaigh to make sure there is proper communication. The board members who appeared at the other committee confirmed there was a much greater degree of transparency and discussion about key decisions. There are a few things. First, I do a written director general's report to the board for every board meeting, which I do not think was the case before, as it was a verbal update. There is now a full written report of several pages. We have a discussion about the key areas that feature in that, and I try to make sure that the key decisions are in that report and can be fully discussed. The second thing is that we attach to that the minutes of all of the leadership meetings, so for anything I have not mentioned, they can see it is minuted from the leadership meetings.

There is a degree of openness now. The current company secretary, Ms Mullooly, is also the head of legal and sits on the board but also sits on the leadership team, so she is a conduit as well, but there is an absolute move towards greater transparency. The Deputy is certainly right that key to some of the issues that RTÉ has had is that not enough was presented to the board or challenged at the board, or not enough information was made available to them. We have put in place a lot of measures to do that.

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