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

The question we are all asking is, who knows what is going on in RTÉ, does the Taoiseach know what is going on in RTÉ, and if he does, can he shed some light on it for the rest of us? We are nearly three weeks into this debacle and the national broadcaster still cannot even get its story straight. If RTÉ's screenwriters were writing the script of this as a drama, one could imagine that it might be rejected as being too far-fetched.

Last week, my colleague, Deputy Catherine Murphy, asked RTÉ's chief financial officer a very simple and straightforward question when he appeared before the Committee of Public Accounts, namely, how many barter accounts does RTÉ have. Mr. Collins was adamant that there was just one. We now know that this is not the case. There are three barter accounts.

I do not particularly want to single out one individual here - that is not helpful - but the performance of the executives collectively before the two separate Oireachtas committees last week was appalling. They were not forthright. They were not transparent. Information had to be dragged out of them and we now know that some of that information was not accurate. It is important to remember that this scandal first came to light in early March. They have now had four months to piece together what happened and they are still scrambling around claiming either confusion or ignorance, and I do not think any of us knows which one is worse. Ordinarily, as we all know from being on committees, when people appear before Oireachtas committees, they do their homework, they carefully sift through their files and they get all of their relevant information in order before they appear, and that was clearly not done last week. This failure to get basic information correct raises serious questions about the board as a whole and its capacity to deal with this issue. Realistically, when this whole controversy relates to secret payments made from a barter account, the very least that we could all expect is that they would know how many barter accounts it has.

I have seen the defensive note that RTÉ prepared setting out what a barter account is, what barter accounts do and how much money went through them and I wonder about the patronising tone of that document because none of us has any problem with barter accounts being used if they are standard across the media industry. What we have a major problem with is barter accounts being used as slush funds to secretly top up the station's top earner. We also have a big issue with the apparent complete lack of financial controls or oversight of these accounts and the chief financial officer giving incorrect information about even how many barter accounts there actually are, not to mention crying poor mouth and demanding pay cuts from its lowest-paid most insecure staff, while secretly paying top-ups to its most exorbitantly-paid staff member, as well as things like wasting €2.2 million on a musical flop.

The Taoiseach spoke about individual members but I am asking about the board on the whole. How can the Taoiseach have confidence at this point in the board?

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