Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The scandal of the secret payments to Ryan Tubridy in RTÉ has highlighted very serious questions about governance and oversight in public bodies in receipt of large amounts of public funding. Of course, it is gut wrenching for the ordinary workers in RTÉ, the ordinary journalists who do not benefit from these staggering salaries that a small few at the top got, or the additional secret payments, to see this scandal unfold when those workers were victims of pay freezes, pay cuts, zero-hour contracts, instances of bogus self-employment and abuse of fixed-term contracts. All of these things now need to be looked at. Something I have been raising for quite a while about what is going on in the film industry echoes this. This is an area where large amount of public money go in and it has been suggested to me that many of the actors and performers working for RTÉ Drama are also being asked to sign buy-out contracts on their intellectual property and the right to royalties. Therefore, at the top, people are getting secret payments and staggering salaries while actors, performers and workers are getting short-changed. Something that requires further investigation and is something I have been talking about, is the money going into the film industry, because the same stuff is going on there. Huge amounts of money and no proper oversight. If properly investigated, there will be a similar picture: a small group at the top doing very well out of large amounts of public money, but the actors, performers, the film crew, the people who actually make films happen, are often being treated in the most shoddy fashion.

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