Communications minister Patrick O’Donovan has claimed he was dropped from an interview with RTÉ‘s Morning Ireland today with only a few minutes’ notice.
“I was due to be on RTÉ, but a minute to being on RTÉ, for some reason, I was declined,” he told Newstalk Breakfast with Anton Savage.
He said the public should know what everyone in RTÉ is earning, which was why RTÉ was “coming under” the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG). This was being “taken care of today under the Broadcasting Amendment Bill.
“I’m bringing forward proposals to have the C&AG appointed as the auditor. So I think that in many ways we’ll arrest an awful lot of these questions that continue to come up time in, time out,” said Mr O’Donovan.
“Why is it that the auditor didn’t see this, that, or the other thing?
“From now on, the members of the public accounts committee will have direct engagement with the auditor, who will be the C&AG.
“And the Comptroller & Auditor General will on an annualised basis go to the accounts, present them and any outstanding issues and it’ll be up to the members of the public accounts committee then to dissect them, which should be the case for every penny of public money that’s been put, as I said a while ago.”
Mr O’Donovan is due to meet with RTÉ bosses on Tuesday amid further financial issues at the national broadcaster.
“We’ve been down this road before, and here we are again,” he said ahead of a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
It comes after RTÉ confirmed on Thursday that it had revised its list of the top 10 highest-earning presenters for 2024 to include Derek Mooney after it “reconsidered what constitutes a presenter”.
Mr O’Donovan said RTÉ staff are “very aggrieved” and said he had received anonymous correspondence from staff at RTÉ.
“There is a lot of hurt in the organisation because people thought this is the end of it, and clearly it is not.” He said there can not be a “vacuum” in the company and said they cannot have a “relationship built on revelation”.
Meanwhile, on his way into Cabinet, Tanáiste Simon Harris said there needed to be an end to the drip feeding of information from RTÉ.
“What we need now is none of this drip feed, none of this will there be another revelation, no salacious detail, we just need facts, information and transparency. That is in the interest of public service broadcasting.
Director General of RTÉ Kevin Bakhurst. File Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos
“I believe it’s in the interest of RTÉ and I believe it’s in the interest of fairness and transparency and I think the Broadcasting Bill by empowering the C&AG to have a role here will actually help strengthen RTÉ in time and will help, I suppose, provide that assurance, that external assurance that I think is needed too.”
Mr Harris added that there appears to be “an upstairs-downstairs” situation in RTÉ and that fairness and transparency were needed to ensure “we don’t have Groundhog Day”.
“I think there’s a lot of hard work and decent people in RTÉ who will feel let down by this latest set of revelations,” he said.
“I don’t want to push to personalise it to anyone, because I think that serves no purpose, but it’s beginning to look like there’s a little bit of an upstairs-downstairs situation going on in RTÉ, that certain producers can be over here, and that’s not fair. It’s not fair in any organisation.”