Ryan Tubridy’s final appearance as host of The Late Late Show took place on the last Friday in May but already the show has become an emblem of a vanished time. That celebratory goodbye, after the surprise decision by Tubridy to end his 14 years at the helm, included the Bond theme Live and Let Die in its opening montage and closed with the host’s signature farewell: “Mind yourselves and mind each other.”
There were tributes from President Michael D Higgins, Paul McCartney, from returnees of fabled Toy Shows past and from Saoirse Ronan. Tubridy finished with a simple soliloquy featuring the trademark flourishes, the nervy fiddling with the buttons of his jacket, a brief impression of Michael Parkinson’s Yorkshire pronunciation of Michael Bublé, even singing a few lines from the crooner before signing off with a simple, emotional thanks to his family. U2 sent a Vespa as a parting gift.
The bookies placed Tubridy high in the betting stakes to succeed Higgins in the Áras. On his radio show earlier that week he had spoken of how happy he was at the choice for his Late Late Show successor, the comedian and television presenter Patrick Kielty, telling listeners: “I just think he has, what they say in the business, the chops.”
If so, he is going to need them. The details of Kielty’s RTÉ financial package (he revealed on Thursday he would get €250,000) was one of many questions circulating as anger and disbelief swept through the Montrose campus since the covert payments made to Tubridy became public. The arrangement that RTÉ had agreed, in conjunction with Renault, the Late Late sponsor, to additional, undisclosed payments to its highest paid presenter – totalling €350,000 since 2017 and separate to his publicly stated annual pay of €440,000 – was not illegal. But to staff and the public paying the compulsory license fee, the deal represented a staggering moral breach of trust and good faith.
The revelation triggered a week of internal RTÉ chaos, its news and current affairs teams in the awkward situation of having to cover the story while the executive wing appeared to all but abdicate responsibility. The resignation of Dee Forbes, the director general, was followed by a series of statements from RTÉ that placed full knowledge of the payments deal at her door. Forbes issued a lengthy resignation statement that noted the RTÉ board “has not treated me with anything approaching [the levels of] fairness, equity and respect”, and: “All of this has had a very serious and ongoing impact on my health and wellbeing.”
“People are livid at the moment,” says one RTÉ producer of the feeling among colleagues. “And this has become a lightning rod for everyone’s dissatisfactions with the organisation. The presenters’ salaries are a drop in the ocean in terms of the overall expenditure at RTÉ. But all of this makes us look so stupid as an organisation.
“There is massive anger at our executives. There is a huge distance between production staff – and all staff, really – and the executive. I had to remind myself, when this broke, of who they are. There are nine people on it. I have met Dee [Forbes] once in her seven years. I have seen her address the staff once, maybe twice. And apart from her, the director of content [Jim Jennings], I would see, but he doesn’t address us in any sort of formal way. There aren’t any meetings where staff can meet. I don’t think I have ever met or seen the rest of the executives at any event or town hall or anything like that. It’s not a problem if you are to assume they are doing their job well. We ignore them. They ignore us. We just go about making programmes and they issue an annual report every year. So now, there is real, real anger.”
On Tuesday, more than 200 RTÉ staff members gathered at various buildings to protest. Distinguished news correspondents Orla O’Donnell (legal affairs), Paul Reynolds (crime) and Emma O’Kelly (education), measured journalists all, spoke with anger and passion about the vexed culture of communication and working conditions within RTÉ through an era of diminishing budgets. Tears were shed, voices were strained.
On Wednesday, RTÉ board chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh, interim deputy director general Adrian Lynch and other executives appeared before the Oireachtas media committee to provide what Cathaoirleach Niamh Smyth would describe on television that night as “half answers”. On the same day a source close to Tubridy confirmed to The Irish Times that the presenter rejected RTÉ's stated position that his decision to step down from The Late Late Show meant his contract was voided and a new one had yet to be drafted. Tubridy, Forbes and Noel Kelly, the publicity-averse agent who has a phalanx of RTÉ presenters on his books, have been invited before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee to provide clarity about the payments.
The line of questioning at the Oireachtas committee was in turns thorny, accusatory, unintentionally comical, uniquely Irish. Hour by hour RTÉ staggered through a series of bulletins in which its institutional failings and the contradictory imperatives of commercial and public service broadcasting featured as its lead story. There was a danger of public exhaustion with the byzantine detail of barter payments and exit fees. As of this weekend the entire saga remains a hot mess.
Thursday’s session before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee quickly degenerated into a public relations nightmare for the RTÉ executive, with the chief financial officer, Richard Collins, at first reluctant and then unable to remember his exact salary, drawing a derisive response from the politicians. Tales of RTÉ's corporate largesse – lavish trips to the rugby world cup; to the Champions League, to a U2 concert in Croke Park, dated to 2019 – although U2 did not perform at Croke Park that year. By Friday morning, the public image of the national broadcaster had changed beyond recognition.
“It was a dam-burst,” Emma O’Kelly, who as chair of the NUJ’s Dublin broadcasting branch spoke out with clarity and courage during the week, says of the mood among staff.
“When I saw the likes of Sinéad [Hussey] and Orla [O’Donnell] speaking out, I felt that. We have endured it for so long. This was a step too far. It really is. People are saying it is a kick in the teeth, that their blood is boiling. And it has to lead to change and to a better RTÉ. We are asking questions of RTÉ that absolutely must be answered. But this goes back to Government and the whole issue around a future funding model for RTÉ.
“If you look at what RTÉ was trying to do, they were running into the arms of commercial entities and doing grubby deals with commercial entities and paying – paying – for these promotional events. But this situation came about because they were starved of funds. The Government needs to grasp the nettle. The television license is not fit for purpose in the 21st century. ”
The ‘talent’
Among the RTÉ archives still circulating is a two-minute clip of a teenage Tubridy on Scratch Saturday reviewing a series of books on U2 published in the run-up to Christmas 1989. It is striking because the presentational style is clearly budding even then, as the young reviewer praises and rubbishes books with unnerving self-assurance. It raises the question as to whether broadcast stars are born or created.
After graduating from UCD – history, Greek and Roman – Tubridy entered RTÉ at a fascinating time. The wheels of the national economy had, after the ravaged 1980s, been greased. RTÉ was beginning to face new radio and television competition. In 1989 Century Radio became the first licensed radio alternative to RTÉ and one of its first attempted signings was to lure Gay Byrne from Montrose with a bank draft for IR£1 million.
RTÉ under fire at the Public Accounts Committee
Byrne stayed put. But the moment marked the beginning of an era when RTÉ’s brightest and best – and there is little dispute that Byrne was the figurehead – could leverage their worth as never before. Over the next decade everything would change, even if it took until 2004 when RTÉ, under pressure, finally capitulated and began to publish payments made to its top 10 earners, before people began to see the fruits of that change.
The loose term for those high earners was the “talent”. An organisation as big as RTÉ will have talented people in all fields – news, documentarians, producers, editors, technicians, wardrobe – but the term referred to those select few whose names, faces and voices became household and featured as personas on the front of the RTÉ Guide. They were the showbiz brigade.
When Tubridy began in RTÉ as a general runner in the mid-1990s, his focus was clear on the direction he wanted to go. “My feeling when I got into RTÉ was I wanted to swim with the big fish, if I could,” he said to Olaf Tyaransen in an interview with Hot Press in 2004.
“I didn’t want to be wandering round the shallow end forever. Because there are too many corpses there. Too many bodies of people who have come in, shone and then faded away. It’s a very tricky game. And I have to say, I find broadcasting very akin to politics. It’s absolutely a political game. Because everyone you meet is a vote. It’s somebody who has something to say about somebody else. If you say something nasty to somebody – domino! All the way down.”
By then his star had already begun to rise. Tubridy’s bright energy was apparent from his period, at the turn of the century, as a roving reporter on Pat Kenny’s morning radio show. He devised and fronted a show called Morning Glory. He took over from the revered Andy O’Mahony as a host of the Sunday Show for a stint that was described as “ill-fated”. He worked as a reporter and occasional presenter on the current affairs show Five-Seven Live. He presented The Full Irish, an early morning radio show on 2FM. He filled in the difficult Saturday night television slot with Tubridy Tonight. He did his turn as presenter of the Rose of Tralee.
Tubridy was given the task of stepping into the Radio One 9am slot, which RTÉ had struggled to fill since Byrne finished in 1998, a show that had begun part of the national morning ritual in many homes since 1973. It was the most daunting hour of his ascending career and early reviews were brutal. Even Byrne, a confidante to Tubridy, admitted he had his doubts.
“I have a high regard for Ryan Tubridy,” the veteran said in an interview in the Sunday Independent in 2006. “And I think he had a fantastic thing going on 2FM and it worked as a package. There was an anarchic feel to it, a daft, youthful feel that anything could happen and it would always be great fun.
“And when Ryan asked me about going to RTÉ One, I said: ‘Well, if they take the package then that’s what RTÉ One needs’, but then that’s not what they did. Because without the other elements of the show, Ryan just became another Pat Kenny/Gay Byrne wannabe, and when he first came on last summer I thought he was going to die an ignominious death; it was that bad and I don’t know yet if he works. And he’s a lovely fella but I think he’s as much to blame because he wanted to adapt to whatever RTÉ One wanted him to be, and that’s a pity because he was doing a fantastic thing that was refreshing change from ‘Moaning’ Ireland just as Ray D’Arcy is a refreshing change from ‘Moaning’ Ireland.”
But Tubridy had the grit. He had the chops. He kept going. He settled in, the listenership grew and three years later, in 2009, he succeeded Kenny as host of The Late Late Show. Tubridy was 36 years old. It was around then that RTÉ’s payment to talent peaked, with Kenny topping the class of 2008 with a fee of €950,000, a figure that dwarfed the annual salary of public servants such as the taoiseach, the president of the United States and the British prime minister.
Ciaran Mullooly was appointed midlands correspondent around the time that Tubridy joined RTÉ. He served in that role until leaving RTÉ two years ago. Like many staffers he witnessed with unease the escalating payments to the top 10 earners.
“In 25 years in RTÉ I can remember at least four of five crisis meetings of staff – cutbacks and tightening of belts and on all these occasions, the issues would come up. And at all those meetings we were told that the commercial reality was that the market was there for these presenters and if we didn’t pay them, someone else would. And the vast majority of staff rejected that idea. The feeling was it was agents and people representing stars created an atmosphere that made the director general feel that they were under threat. It created a frenzy.
“And the other factor was that the country was in a boom period. There was money available. At one stage in that period you couldn’t buy advertising space. I remember proposing they open regional offices to take in more radio advertising and the executive person came back to me and said: we don’t have space for it. That’s where this culture began. Then, when the crash came, there was an issue immediately.”
Mullooly was an established correspondent doing his best to work within pared budgets during the economic collapse, when RTÉ entered what was often described as an “existential crisis”. When there was talk of closing the regional offices, he was among a group who struck a deal with Athlone IT and other colleges to use their studios for a third of the rent paid elsewhere. He was instrumental in trying to develop a €6 million science museum framed around the Marconi Transmitter, switched on by Éamon de Valera when RTÉ first broadcast in 1934. He says that Fáilte Ireland were on board; that local businesses had committed to helping.
“We got f**k all support from RTÉ. And I met with some of these characters, and they looked at us and said they couldn’t afford it. We asked them for the land around the transmitter for a feasibility study and they said they were selling it. They went to auction over our heads and got less than €300,000 for it. And at the same time, they were giving Ryan Tubridy more than that.”
Mullooly left RTÉ to take up a community development role but his phone has been “hopping” all week with messages from friends and colleagues for whom this latest debacle represents the last straw. He says there was never any sense of favouritism about the rise of colleagues to “talent” status.
“I stand back and recognise their broadcasting ability. The problem is that we are too small a country to pay out that sort of money. It is all very well to say the presenter of the BBC news can be paid ‘x’ amount. But it is a country of 60 million people paying a fee. Ireland is a small country. The scale was lost during the spending and the boom, and we never recovered from that.”
Cap on payments
Ireland is a small country, never more so than on weeks like this. The fall from grace of RTÉ’s golden boy, “Tubs”, has been jaw-dropping. But behind the persona is an individual in an isolated place. Speak to some of his colleagues and there is an element of sympathy for the lonely and pressurised situation in which he finds himself this week. But they also struggle to see the circumstances that will facilitate a return to RTÉ’s airwaves.
It takes an unusual combination of traits – chutzpah and what the executive wing of RTÉ breezily refers to as “talent” - to set out to become a star. But also, perhaps, a degree of naivete. To want to be it, you must believe it exists. Tubridy was a teenager in the analogue age when RTÉ commanded a faithful and more temperate audience. Now the audience has endless choice on multiple devices and the mood is one of easy distraction and impatience. Ask any teenager today about their favourite RTÉ star and they will look at you in bafflement.
When you become that thing, the household name – Gay or Gerry or Miriam or Marian or Joe or Mike or Bibi or Derek – you do relinquish something of yourself. Tubridy largely abandoned social media a decade ago. If he has enjoyed much public affection, he has also been subject to vitriolic attacks while walking down the street, while standing in a shop. You can never drop the mask. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the contract fees are so lavish. Nice work if you can get it, everyone harrumphs. But if you could get it, would you want it?
“Look at what people have to do,” Pat Kenny pointed out in an interview with Shane Hegarty in The Irish Times in 2009 after Tubridy’s first spin in The Late Late big chair.
“They have to sell their souls. They have to become public figures. They are everybody’s property. And they pay a price for that and the only way you can pay them back for that’s in monetary terms. There is no other way of recognising what people are giving up: their family privacy; their freedom to walk down the street unaccosted. And they give it up willingly, but it’s the only recompense besides the job.”
As RTÉ’s budget shrank, so did the payments to its star stable. In 2012 Tubridy was paid €750,000 by RTÉ. Still, the contract figures remained eye-watering and became increasingly hard for mainstream staff to tolerate as they were repeatedly told there was no money. This week, with the revelation that excess payments were agreed during the pandemic period when other staff were struggling, collective patience snapped.
For all that, it would be wrong to portray RTÉ as a joyless place. Many of its staff are well paid. “I have always found it a good place to work,” says one staffer. “People by and large like it. You are working with nice, interesting people doing interesting work. It is reasonably well paid.”
And it would be untrue, also, to suggest there is frostiness or distance between the presenters on high contracts and their colleagues who are tied to staff rates.
“That relationship is very good,” says Emma O’Kelly. “Everybody rolls up their sleeves and works together. At the end of the day we are all working hard and we are all human and we respect the talent and ability of people who are paid exorbitant pay. In many cases there are friendships. But that doesn’t mean that we condone these exorbitant payments. We want a cap on any payment – whether to a so-called talent or presenter or a senior executive. We believe they should be capped at Civil Service levels.”
While it has been a dismal week for RTÉ as an institution, it may help clear the air. Through the murk and obfuscation of the press releases and evasions at executive levels came the shining example of what RTÉ means from the staff members who gathered in protest and spoke with such zeal. For years O’Kelly sat in meetings and wondered why the decision-makers within RTÉ were so inflexible and intransigent in negotiations about basic working conditions.
“I have thought about that. I have sat at the table for all types of things. And I really don’t think they understand what staff are up against in doing their job or the kind of conditions we have to endure. And I also don’t think they understand the commitment and dedication that we feel towards this organisation.”
They might do now. At the Oireachtas committee hearings Ní Raghallaigh said a “cultural issue” had taken hold within the corridors. And she wasn’t talking about the arts coverage. It seems apparent that the institution has reached its divergent roads.
“I think it would be a pity if the main lesson taken from this were just about, oh we need to get earnings under control,” says Prof Jane Suiter of the Institute for Future Media at Dublin City University (DCU).
“I think it is about a move from a 20th century model of dual-funding broadcasting to something fit for the 21st century. Clearly, as the Taoiseach said, we need to look at what other public service broadcasters are doing. It is also about the whole kind of line between commercial and public service and the fact that it hasn’t been very clear. All sorts of incursions are made into the public service by the commercial side. And this is just a symptom of that. Yes, pay is one part of it. But really what we need to get to grips with is how to change the organisation to make sure it is firmly focused on its remit, which is public service. And also, to look at the leadership. How they decide these contracts is one thing. But the other is how RTÉ as an institution is dealing with all the commercial and political pressures that come with 21st century media in an era when platforms are taking a lot of the advertising and when defamation is rampant.”
RTÉ stardust
“The chops” is an old jazz expression referring to the embouchure of a trumpet or horn player, to their technical skill and flourishes. Byrne spent his twilight years in Montrose summoning the jazz gods with that mellifluous voice on his Sunday show on Lyric FM. He never sounded more content. And there was a suspicion that most of the audience tuned in to hear their favourite instrument – Byrne’s voice – as much as the sounds of Dizzy or Coltrane. The RTÉ stardust originated with him and there is an argument to be made that all of RTÉ’s showmen and show-women who came in his wake have been responding or reacting to the unreachable standard that he set. Tubridy put it best in the tribute he wrote in the book of condolence when Byrne died in 2019: “You wrote the rule book – we all followed. RIP, my friend.”
Things end. This strange week may be the beginning of the end of the conceit of television stardom in Ireland. Some 20 years ago, towards the end of his carefree interview with Hot Press – pints and a pack of smokes (Silk Cut Blues) on the table – Tubridy was asked if he had a motto in life.
“I do actually,” he said. “It’s a Latin expression that goes something like this ...[indecipherable on tape]. Essentially what it means is, ‘Some day we will look back on all of this and laugh’.”
Some day.
