Steve Carson, RTÉ director of video, has been thinking about the future of The Late Late Show and can confirm one thing – he wants Patrick Kielty to stay.
The presenter is embarking on the third season of a three-season contract and, notwithstanding a softer set of viewing figures in his second year, RTÉ is keen to stick with him beyond this next run.
“Patrick is a fantastic host of the Late Late,” says Carson, describing his hiring in 2023 as “a clever call” by RTÉ colleagues.
“He’s obviously got the funny chops, the entertainment experience. But he’s also got a deep hinterland. If you’ve seen the documentaries he made about Northern Ireland and if you know him at all, you can tell he’s got a real kind of depth, a real empathy and curiosity, and a strong sense of what it is to be Irish.”
RM Block
This, he says, is a “strong perspective” for the host of RTÉ’s flagship chatshow to have.
“There’s been different presenters of the Late Late over the years, but only one of them has won an All-Ireland medal and that’s Patrick Kielty, so I think he’s brilliant at the Late Late, and obviously we’ll talk to him about the future. I think it would be great if he would continue in the role.”
We’re talking in Carson’s office in RTÉ’s Stage 7 building. When I recall that he was working in an open-plan area when we met 11 years ago in his native Belfast, where he was head of BBC Northern Ireland Productions, he says he still prefers that.
Being in your own office all day can be isolating, he finds, and it’s better to be accessible to colleagues anyway, so he only dips into it for meetings.
The boomerang RTÉ executive (57) – who is the husband of Prime Time and Radio 1 presenter Miriam O’Callaghan – left the organisation for the BBC in 2013, then returned last October after he was appointed to one of two newly created senior positions on the RTÉ leadership team.
Both his job title and the strategy mantra he invokes – “sustaining linear, growing streaming” – reflect a battle against a long-term decline in traditional TV viewing and a mission to further accelerate use of the RTÉ Player.
Alongside this viewing shift, there’s the politics of it all, with RTÉ still operating in the shadow of its 2023 pay scandal. It didn’t deter him from rejoining?
“Look, I was coming in as part of the new leadership team to move things forward, so I think that’s really what my focus has been on.”
State of flux
RTÉ in 2025 is in a state of flux. If Carson is clear about who should present the Late Late, he’s more equivocal about other aspects of its future, from where it will be broadcast to whether it will continue to be made by its own staff. Similar question marks dangle over other in-house shows.
This is because under director-general Kevin Bakhurst’s New Direction strategy – a blueprint for RTÉ to evolve and satisfy reforms demanded by Government – RTÉ intends to shrink its workforce by 400 people, or 20 per cent, over the coming years. An amendment to the Broadcasting Act is also poised to require RTÉ to spend 25 per cent of its public funding on commissions from independent production companies.
[ RTÉ board approves plan for ‘new direction’ of broadcasterOpens in new window ]
Separately, staff have been told that the studios at its Montrose campus are “reaching end-of-life”, as Carson puts it, and are too expensive to rebuild, forcing the relocation of the Late Late and soap opera Fair City.
The chatshow could be made offsite by either an RTÉ production team or an independent company, or it could be a “hybrid” of both, he says.
“The one thing I would say about Fair City and the Late Late is that both of those shows are staples of our schedule and will remain so for years to come.”
RTÉ recently announced the end of one form of in-house production, with independent producers invited to pitch to make its “Christian worship content” from 2026 onwards.
“Masses and services would be an example of where we’re moving to,” says Carson. Broadcasting these from a variety of locations around Ireland, “rather than everyone having to get on a bus” to Donnybrook, will result in a “stronger offering to audiences”, he argues.
Employees involved in other aspects of in-house production have been wondering if their department is next. After a meeting with Carson earlier this year, RTÉ’s in-house documentary makers were left feeling alarmed about the fate of their unit.
But Carson says it is “premature” to talk about the winding down of particular units. “There will be changes to in-house production,” he says more generally of the process.
RTÉ colleagues now, and I’m not just saying it, are genuinely future-focused. There’s less harking back to the past than I would have observed as a freelancer
— Steve Carson
The broadcaster is assessing 325 applications made to this year’s voluntary exit programme, for which it set a target of at least 100 departures.
“When we make offers and people respond, we will be making a series of changes,” he says.
He’s no stranger to tumultuous industry times. His first stint as an RTÉ executive began during the recession in 2009. At the BBC, too, upheaval and cutbacks were a facet of the business.
“I was involved in a large number of voluntary [redundancy] rounds in my time at the BBC,” he says. “Broadcasting is going through change. Change on change.”
It was at the BBC that he started his career, working in Manchester and then London. He met O’Callaghan while she was a reporter and he a producer on Newsnight and followed her to Dublin in 1997, initially freelancing for RTÉ.
He told The Irish Times in 2009 that RTÉ in the late 1990s was a place “where people would be coming up with reasons not to do things”, where “there was a sense that the golden years were gone”, and where the older generation enjoyed reliving the perceived glory days of 1980 drama Strumpet City.
“RTÉ colleagues now, and I’m not just saying it, are genuinely future-focused. There’s less harking back to the past than I would have observed as a freelancer,” he says.
He set up his own company, Mint Productions, with O’Callaghan in 2000, the same year they married, and made documentaries including Haughey (2005) and Bertie (2008) before winding it up to join RTÉ as director of programmes.
After four years at the BBC in Belfast, he switched to its Scottish headquarters in 2017, first as head of multi-platform commissioning, then as head of BBC Scotland. This was “an honour and a privilege”, he says, and for seven years he commuted weekly from his home in Dublin to Glasgow.
By 2024, it “felt like the right time” to return to Dublin, though when the director of video role popped up that April, he ruled out an application as he wanted to stay on for the UK general election, which wasn’t expected until the end of the year.
“Then, as it happened, Rishi [Sunak] called it early,” he says.
Priorities
So what is it like being back at RTÉ?
“It’s been good. I think there’s stuff I can bring in from my BBC experience, but there’s a lot of good people here. There were a lot of people already rolling their sleeves up to work on some of the things you’re going to see over the next months.”
Improving RTÉ’s relationship with the independent sector has also been a priority, with Carson citing plans for multi-year deals, better communication and a refreshed commissioning team.
RTÉ is far more “joined up” than when he was last here, he thinks. For upcoming comedy drama The Walsh Sisters, he’s been working with the audio team on a companion podcast, while visualised podcasts are also in vogue – The Traitors Ireland’s aftershow, Uncloaked, is likely to be followed on to RTÉ screens by news podcast Behind the Story.
He talks about a balance between light and shade, between looking back and focusing on “the here and now”, between familiar series and new, “surprising” things.
I always think the benchmark of a show is ‘does it feel right, does it come across well?’
— Steve Carson
“Even the recruitment of Siobhán [McSweeney] to The Traitors sends a signal of something you mightn’t expect to see.”
The Traitors Ireland, made by Kite Entertainment, is RTÉ’s big autumn set-piece. Carson has watched two episodes of the reality competition series and had “sneak peeks” at other bits. As far as any viewing targets go, he never looks at “the overnights”, he says.
“I always think the benchmark of a show is ‘does it feel right, does it come across well?’ and from what I’ve seen this is a really, really great show.”
I love The Traitors, I say, but isn’t there a risk that a portion of the RTÉ audience will just not get it and be confused by its prominent scheduling?
“You have to have something for everyone, but not everything is for everyone,” he says.
On that note, I ask him a question recently posed by The Irish Times In the News podcast: is the Rose of Tralee uncancellable?
“It attracts and retains a very large audience, but we look at everything on its merits,” he says.
“One of the things the Rose of Tralee traces is the story of emigration from Ireland. When I was last here, there was a run of Roses whose parents had emigrated from the North in the ’70s and I remember thinking, ‘That’s interesting.’ So, I wouldn’t overstate it, but it’s a way of capturing that part of our social history too.”
And then there are the occasional disappointments about what RTÉ doesn’t show. He has mentioned live sport, so I ask him about a recent source of disgruntlement: RTÉ’s decision not to broadcast the second leg of Shelbourne’s Europa League qualifier against HNK Rijeka due to budgetary and personnel constraints.
“We did cover another leg,” says Carson.
“Irish clubs’ European runs, we’re keen to cover them. They tend to come up ad hoc, so we look at them as spot buys, and we buy what we can. Sometimes there are scheduling clashes with other sport we’re doing, and we obviously have to make decisions at some point.”
Philosophy
Both sport and shows like The Traitors are part of the “full Reithian trilogy of inform, educate and entertain”, he says, referring to the philosophy of the BBC’s first director-general, John Reith, whose original BBC desk he sat beside in Glasgow.
“It did kind of keep him top of mind. More than a century ago, he came up with these tenets of public service broadcasting. And I think it’s really important for RTÉ to do those three things.”
Reith would have been horrified by today’s television industry, though, right?
“It’s a counter-factual. He’s not around now. But bear in mind, he was a Scotsman from Aberdeenshire, and I don’t think he was famed for his sense of humour, and yet right at the beginning, he put ‘to entertain’ in. He saw that as a crucial part of public service broadcasting.”
Carson has learned over the years that it can be “creatively simpler” at the serious end of the spectrum.
“The entertaining part of the brief can be a wee bit riskier, I always think. Like, believe me, if you make a dull programme, and I’ve done that, at worst people shrug,” he says.
“If you try to go for something that’s entertaining and it doesn’t quite land, people seem to get quite annoyed.”
