Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

It is now six days since we first learned the bombshell news of RTÉ's secret payments to Ryan Tubridy. Incredibly, we are still waiting to find out the most basic information. For instance, we do not know how the entire €345,000 in excess payments was made to Mr. Tubridy. How is that still the case? How can the national broadcaster, which is in receipt of €200 million in State funding annually, not know how it funded secret payments to its highest earner? RTÉ has been aware of this issue since March, three months ago. How many accounts is it sifting through, looking for these payments? Are its accounts really that convoluted? The whole thing just seems extraordinary.

The drip feed of information from RTÉ has been so bad that The Sunday Timesgot the scoop before the RTÉ news team on how payments were made. The Sunday Timesdescribed how Mr. Tubridy's agent was instructed to send a British media company, Astus, invoices which were labelled as consultancy services. There was also an explicit instruction to anonymise the transaction so that Mr. Tubridy's name did not appear anywhere in the paperwork. Astus then settled those invoices at a cost to RTÉ of more than €230,000, comprising €150,000 for Mr. Tubridy and more than €80,000 in fees. In order to pay Mr. Tubridy €150,000, RTÉ chose to do so in a way that cost it an additional €80,000.

No wonder the organisation is a financial basket case if that is how it goes about its business. The convoluted manner in which these payments were made and the fact they did not appear in Mr. Tubridy's published salary make it clear the entire objective here was concealment. Whatever way you want to spin it, this was a deliberate ploy expressly designed to mask the real income of RTÉ's top earner. Meanwhile, Dee Forbes, in her statement yesterday, stated the object of the exercise was to achieve cost saving. Why, however, was a commercial partner tapped to pay some of the salary of Mr. Tubridy, out of all RTÉ's top earners? Is it so the board could pretend it remained below €500,000 when it published its figures? That is not to mention the whole issue of RTÉ underwriting guarantees it never thought it would have to pay. You would have to question whether it learned anything from the financial crisis.

The Taoiseach stated yesterday that he had confidence in the board, which seems odd when none of us yet know the full facts of this situation. Will he clarify whether he has confidence in the executive board? Does he have any idea when we will learn how the €120,000 payment between 2017 and 2019 was made and if significant fees were associated with that? When will we have all the details of this hugely damaging affair?

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