With last Friday’s confirmation of Rick O’Shea as the full-time presenter of RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena, the most turbulent period in the history of Ireland’s radio schedules has drawn to a close. Over the past six months, virtually every slot in the weekday schedules of both national talk stations has seen a change of personnel.
It is fitting in a way that O’Shea should be the last piece of the jigsaw. Unlike the other changes, the vacancy he fills was caused not by an editorial decision but by the sad and untimely death of the previous presenter, Seán Rocks.
Otherwise nearly every programme between 7am and 8pm on Radio 1, with the exception of News at One, where Rachael English took over from the retiring Bryan Dobson in 2024, has seen a change of personnel since last summer.
Over at Newstalk, only Andrea Gilligan and Seán Moncrieff remain where they were. Moncrieff (a columnist for this newspaper) is now the undisputed long-term survivor, having presented Newstalk’s midafternoon show since May 2004.
“In order for things to stay the same, everything must change.” Tancredi Falconeri’s observation in The Leopard seems to be a guiding principle of Irish radio. All this shifting and shuffling has doubtless been stressful for everyone involved, not least the various production teams, but the new landscape still feels oddly familiar. There have been no radical alterations in format.
The nearest thing is a reordering of the midmorning flow at Radio 1, with Oliver Callan shifting to a later, longer slot and David McCullagh coming on straight after Morning Ireland. But the general-interest chat format remains a constant throughout the day.
All the focus, therefore, has been on who’s doing the chatting in a game of musical chairs that has seen big names exit, slide sideways or arrive from elsewhere. Of all these, it was Ray D’Arcy who was most glaringly left standing when the music stopped.
His recent interviews promoting a new daily podcast have not shed further light on the circumstances of his departure from RTÉ. His account of whether or not he was given advance warning that his contract might be in jeopardy remains flatly at odds with RTÉ’s statements on the matter.
Pat Kenny’s comments to the Sunday Independent at the weekend were rather more pointed and more revealing than D’Arcy’s. When you are 78 years old with half a century of broadcasting behind you, there is no need to kowtow to anyone, and Kenny was refreshingly candid about the mishandling, as he sees it, of his shift to weekends by Newstalk’s management.
He was particularly critical of the way his production team were kept in the dark about their new roles while negotiations over his own position had already concluded.
Just as interesting were his views on the broader radio landscape and the role of what he called “the talent”. He was critical of the shared obsession of radio managers and newspapers alike with the Joint National Listenership Research figures. “I don’t believe in the JNLRs. I never have,” he said, suggesting that the print media’s fondness for green and red arrows can create a feedback loop that damages both presenters and the programmes they front.
He believes RTÉ management in effect used its top presenters as human shields, diverting public and political attention towards star salaries and away from the organisation’s own substantial failings. It is not a particularly popular position to take, but it is not an unreasonable one.
The sums paid to some of RTÉ’s top names – Pat Kenny among them – were impossible to justify. The responsibility for that rests with the management that agreed to pay them, not the presenters who negotiated the best deals they could.
Kenny also questioned the logic of Kevin Bakhurst’s position that no RTÉ presenter’s pay should exceed his own salary of €250,000. As D’Arcy also pointed out, this figure does not take account of pension contributions and allowances which, according to accounts for 2024, brought the director general’s annual package to €339,954. Several senior managers also receive over €300,000. The salary cap, in other words, is not quite what is being presented by RTÉ.
There’s a related question about whether RTÉ intends to move other prominent presenters on to staff contracts when current arrangements expire. Changes in employment law, and a recent significant judgment on the status of food delivery workers, have renewed scrutiny of contracts in the media industry in general. RTÉ’s particularly sorry history of bogus self-employment is another embarrassing management failure that has already cost the broadcaster millions, with more to come.
On the face of it, radio presenters, who show up daily to work with staff teams using company facilities, look very much like full-time employees under Irish law. Whether those presenters want or need the same employment protections as lower-paid gig economy workers is debatable, though. And Kenny points out correctly that broadcasters require the flexibility to respond to changing audience tastes.
There is something about fronting live broadcasts to a mass audience that is closer to the performing arts than to a civil-service position, and most jobs in the performing arts are contract-based for precisely that reason.
RTÉ fell into the peculiar trap, over many years, of treating some of those roles as permanent when it had no obligation to do so, creating the worst of both worlds: overpaid broadcasters who couldn’t be replaced. It may be on the verge of finding a new way to make the same old mistake.