Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This all comes down to trust. Anybody we have spoken to in recent days has told us about their absolute lack of trust in RTÉ. In fairness, most of them talk about the fact that they feel absolutely sickened by what has happened, but I could not say they are shocked. That is half the problem.

We all know the issues that have existed for a long period regarding certain of the big players in RTÉ who are paid a huge amount of money. To a degree, RTÉ put up its hands last week - it took a fair bit of arm-twisting before the hands went up – in regard to the fact that at times they are bidding against themselves. The major issue that has brought this to a head is a lie. I refer to the idea that everybody across RTÉ - the hardworking journalists and those whom Deputy Farrell says keep the show on the road - was told they had to take a 15% cut. They were told everyone else was taking the cut, including the big players. The biggest player of them all was Ryan Tubridy. Unfortunately, the reality is that it looks like the director general, with a small number of others, was able to put together a means to make a back-ways payment. I do not know any other way to call it. In fairness, it was put a hell of a lot better by Siún Ní Raghallaigh, who described it as "an act designed to deceive". There was an absolute systemic failure.

The good news is the fact that finally, after a number of years, this was brought to light. I have a particular difficulty not only that there was a means of paying someone €75,000, and a number of excuses were made to people who asked questions in regard to that, but also that it was put through a barter account, which is an absolute slush fund, at a huge cost. Renault was involved. It looks like any events that it put on also cost the taxpayer. We are talking about €47,000. If we were not dealing with Covid, we would probably be looking at an even bigger bill in relation to that. Not only was it an act designed to deceive, but it was a really expensive act designed to deceive.

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