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

The situation in RTÉ at this point is an absolute shambles. It has been going on for nine months since the revelations about the extraordinary, large, secret payments to Ryan Tubridy on top of the obscene salary he received and, indeed, the salaries many other top presenters received, and many executives were receiving obscene salaries. There was outrage, there were hearings, there was questioning, there was going to be reform and a grip was going to be got on this. Here we are, nine months later, and the issue which outraged the public remains with us: top executives who presided over a shambles walking away with enormous golden handshakes on top of salaries they received which most ordinary workers could never dream of. That is what outrages people. I contrast the golden handshakes being received by these executives with, for example, the Debenhams workers who gave 25 and sometimes up to 40 years of service to a company that just upped and left them with nothing, and the Government said “We can do nothing about it.” There was no money available to compensate them for being screwed to the wall by a company to which they had been loyal for 20 or 30 years. Yet, we do not know who signed off on the big payouts to the top executives in RTÉ in the aftermath of a scandal about secret payments and barter accounts on top of obscene salaries. There has been a shocking failure to get to grips with this.

I am less concerned, frankly, about the “Who knew what when?” and more concerned with the failure of the Government to get on top of this nine months afterwards, while the same issues that were at the heart of the public outrage and the scandal persist with regard to the non-disclosure agreements about big payouts to people who presided over misgovernance and a financial debacle. We still do not know. Nobody seems to know. To me, that is shocking.

There is something elementary, as far as I am concerned. It is a public service broadcaster. In the public service, for the most part, we know what the salary grades are, we know what politicians get paid, we know what civil servants get paid and it is publicly available information. However, in a publicly funded national broadcaster, we have non-disclosure agreements and big exit payments. We have not got on top of that, we do not have the information and there are still rows about “Who knew what when?” and about the decision to sign off on these payments. It is shambolic. It is indicative of the way in which State-funded bodies, agencies, semi-States and so on can operate at arm’s length - that is the phrase that has been used - from ministerial and governmental responsibility. This is the issue that has to be addressed.

To my mind, the really unfortunate thing about all of this is that the people who are actually going to suffer at the end of the day, and who are suffering, are the ordinary workers in RTÉ, who could never dream of the salaries these top executives were getting and they will certainly not be getting these big exit payments, yet hundreds of their jobs are facing suppression. The exact thing that should not have happened is almost certainly going to happen. Hundreds of decent jobs, not super well-paid jobs but the jobs of ordinary workers, are to be suppressed. The quality of public service broadcasting inevitably will be degraded as a result because it is precisely the jobs that actually make the place work, rather than those of the top executives, that will be suppressed and outsourced. That is compounding the situation of bogus self-employment and outsourcing of what used to be decent jobs to the private sector. That is the net result and it will degrade the quality of public service.

The hiatus that has been created is a governmental responsibility due to not getting to grips with the funding model and the reform. We are still waiting for reports in March and the Government has not made any decisions about the key issues that lie at the heart of this, namely, how we are going to protect, support and finance public service broadcasting but reform its governance to make sure these outrageous salaries and exit payments end, things become transparent and properly governed, and the people who make decisions are properly held responsible.

I sort of wonder if the Government wanted this thing to roll on because it has been a convenient punching bag. For once, those in the Government were not the ones under the cosh and there was a certain joy and satisfaction in that the Government could point the finger at people who were not politicians and blame them. That is not to say they were not without fault, but the tragedy is that the people who end up really paying are the ordinary workers, who genuinely were not at fault, and the taxpayer and the television licence payer, who should have the right to expect decent, properly funded, high-quality public service broadcasting. I singularly hold the Government responsible for failing to get on top of this.

As a last word, I personally believe this is potentially the tip of a very big iceberg, as I have said. As the Minister knows, in the other area with which I am concerned, there is a very big overlap between RTÉ and the Irish audiovisual sector, and in the Irish film sector in particular, and many of the people who have crossed over from one to the other also receive huge amounts of public money. To my mind, there is no proper oversight and governance of how that money is spent and whether the State is getting back what it is supposed to get in terms of quality employment and training.

I acknowledge the Minister held a forum recently, which I attended, but it was very interesting, given what we are hearing from ordinary RTÉ workers about how their jobs are jeopardised and how they are suffering the consequences of the decisions made at the top by top executives, that we heard much the same from quite a wide variety of people at that film industry forum, who talked about their precarious employment situation. They wonder how all of this public money goes in, yet many of them have a completely precarious existence.

Again, a small number of people at the top are the major beneficiaries of large amounts of public money while the Government seems to keep it all at arm's length, never properly looking into whether the public - because it is public money - is getting what it is supposed to get for this large investment and whether the workers in these industries, whether RTÉ or the film sector, are getting the secure and decent quality employment they deserve. The signs suggest it is the workers who will pay and that the quality of public service broadcasting will be degraded. I bet that it will be areas like arts, culture and music that will pay. As RTÉ will have to keep the news and current affairs, it is the other stuff that will be suppressed, outsourced and privatised, again adding to the precarity faced by people who work in the arts and cultural sector. I hold the Government collectively responsible for this. It is shambolic that after nine months, we are still facing the same issues.

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