Like a hastily assembled musical, the RTÉ payments controversy is painfully trudging into a third week that will finally see the main stars perform their number. The state broadcaster’s highest-paid presenter Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly are scheduled to appear twice on the Oireachtas stage on Tuesday – a matinee before the Public Accounts Committee followed by an evening show in front of the Media Committee. 

The more the sorry saga looks like the 1967 film The Producers, the more urgent the need for all participants to turn it into “a guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night beauty,” in the words of Mel Brooks’s disastrously incompetent eponymous duo.

While Tubridy cannot address the governance shortcomings exposed at the top of RTÉ by the revelation of his secret payments, he has the power to distance his name from the scandal and defuse the situation by reversing the most controversial transaction exposed since June 29. 

To do this, all he has to do when the curtain lifts on his opening statement before the Public Accounts Committee is to announce that he is giving RTÉ back €150,000. 

This is the sum he, unknown to the Dáil or public, received last year as a result of RTÉ underwriting a guarantee for €75,000 in fees for each of 2021 and 2022 that originated in a commercial side deal with the Late Late Show’s sponsor Renault Ireland, which never materialised in those years.

RTÉ’s position is that it paid the resulting €150,000 to Tubridy via his agent as a result of a valid, albeit “verbal”, contract. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of Tubridy or his agent in obtaining this money. What was wrong was the series of decisions on RTÉ’s side to underwrite those liabilities and to hide both that decision and the resulting payments behind a smoke screen of deceptive documentation and poorly monitored barter accounts.

Those are matters internal to RTÉ and individual responsibilities have yet to be fully established. They don’t affect the validity of the promise made to Tubridy that he would get his payments. It is unclear how much he knew about the details, as the scant documentation unveiled to this point was entirely handled on his behalf by Kelly’s agency.

The facts so far, however, have revealed that this particular tranche of €150,000, while legally paid, was from an RTÉ process perspective a questionable transfer of public money to Tubridy.

RTÉ had paid Tubridy a previous top-up of €75,000 for 2020 via a convoluted credit note to Renault in recognition of Tubridy’s participation in delayed showroom events that effectively took place two years later. By contrast, for 2021 and 2022, Tubridy received €150,000 originally intended for public appearances, directly from RTÉ’s barter account, for… nothing.

Tubridy may or may not have known at the time that these funds were extracted from the barter account destined to generate commercial revenue for RTÉ as a whole. He will get his chance to explain what happened from his perspective on Tuesday. 

But now the entire country knows that this was RTÉ money, also known as the public’s money.

Whether sought by Tubridy himself, or by his agent without his knowledge, the top-up payments have also resulted in him taking a lower pay cut than other top earners when RTÉ was struggling to make ends meet. 

The only decent thing to do now that these facts are established is to hand back the €150,000.

Decent is a word the Irish public value particularly highly, and it has been closely associated with Tubridy. He has lent his popularity to raise €17 million for charities since 2020 through the Toy Show Appeal and supported countless non-profits in other ways. He leveraged his broadcast and social media audience to promote small Irish businesses thrown into disarray by the pandemic. He has been a champion of reading for children and campaigned against the abuse of their privacy by online multinationals. This should not be forgotten.

Receiving €150,000 in public money for nothing was legal. Keeping it, however, would be indecent. 

*****

Elsewhere this week, Francesca reported how the ramifications from Wirecard’s downfall continue to play out in Ireland. When the German fintech giant went bust, a Dublin-based company was founded on its distressed assets. Now the VC-backed NomuPay is being sued for millions by a New Zealand company for alleged breach of contract.

Another embattled company has been Altada, the Cork-based artificial intelligence business now in twin receivership and liquidation proceedings. Its liquidator told creditors that a Garda investigation was under way into Altada and that the deficit left by the company was set to hit €20 million. Tom had the story.Economist Colm McCarthy added a public finance angle to the debate on Irish neutrality. In his column, he pointed out that Nato members are expected to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. This would be the biggest public expenditure project ever proposed in this country.

Ian Kehoe, the editor of The Currency, is on the board of RTÉ. He is a member of the Audit & Risk Committee of the board that commissioned the Grant Thornton report. He was not involved in the editing of this article nor did he see it prior to publication.