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

I return to the €120,000 in secret payments made by RTÉ to Ryan Tubridy between 2017 and 2019. It is not acceptable that we are being told it could be another month before we have any clarity about how those payments were made.

It is impossible to understand how RTÉ thought that would fly. For a start, if RTÉ identified that €120,000 over and above his published salary was paid to Mr. Tubridy, how can it then claim ignorance as to how those payments were made? How did RTÉ even identify the amount of €120,000 in the first place if it does not know where it came from? Are we to assume that the difficulty in tracking this payment is because it was part of another commercial relationship, with the invoice being anonymised and routed through a third-party company in another jurisdiction? Two Oireachtas committees are supposed to meet over the next two days to try to get to the bottom of this financial quagmire, but we all know that they will not be able to without all of the relevant information. The Taoiseach said earlier that he has not received any explanation from RTÉ as to why it will take four weeks to publish the report on the payment relating to the 2017-19 period. What is the Taoiseach going to do about this? Will he request that whatever information is available about that payment is put into the public domain today?

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