RT\u00c9 have been in hot water again of late, with Derek Mooney’s exclusion from the broadcaster’s top-10 highest-paid presenter list.<\/p>\n
The revelation is reminiscent of the scandal which rocked the national broadcaster almost three years ago, after it was revealed that RT\u00c9 had underdeclared payments to former Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy.<\/p>\n
That crisis later widened out to other governance matters, and the controversy around financial mismanagement at the station was seen as a driver behind a fall in TV licence receipts.<\/p>\n
It also prompted a series of heavyweight Oireachtas committees and resulted in the Government changing how the organisation is funded.<\/p>\n
But, back to 2026.<\/p>\n
Between Derek Mooney’s reclassification from presenter to producer, Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy receiving pay after they finished working, the Communications Minister calling for a presenter pay audit at the broadcaster and Patrick Kielty’s published salary being more than he said it was, what is going on in RT\u00c9?<\/p>\n
Derek Mooney – Presenter to producer, to presenter again?<\/p>\n
It was revealed this past week that Derek Mooney was paid enough to feature among RT\u00c9’s top 10 highest-paid presenters every year between 2020 and 2025.<\/p>\n
But in 2020, Mooney was reclassified as a producer in his contract, and the station said he had not been considered for inclusion in the lists since then. He has been presenting programmes on RT\u00c9 since 1994.<\/p>\n
However, RT\u00c9 said on Thursday that it had reconsidered what constitutes a presenter in line with the implementation of the Government\u2019s Expert Advisory Committee\u2019s recommendations following the previous financial management scandal.<\/p>\n
It has therefore included Mooney in the 2025 list \u2013 and republished its 2024 list with his inclusion to allow for a year-on-year comparison.<\/p>\n
He was therefore the seventh highest-paid presenter in the organisation last year, on \u20ac202,264, and 8th in 2024, on \u20ac197,151.<\/p>\n
Mooney last appeared on top-10 earner lists in 2014. In 2019, RT\u00c9 announced plans to reduce fees paid to top contracted on-air presenters by 15 per cent.<\/p>\n
RT\u00c9 director general Kevin Bakhurst said he does not think the reclassification was a side deal to avoid pay cuts from 2020, and when asked if Mooney had taken a pay cut that year, Bakhurst admitted “I don’t think he got a pay cut.”<\/p>\n
After calls to publish his earnings back to 2020, RT\u00c9 published the figures, which confirmed Mooney would have featured in the yearly lists if the same criteria had applied at the time.<\/p>\n
He earned \u20ac195,079 in 2020, \u20ac187,854 in 2021, \u20ac188,885 in 2022, and \u20ac192,592 in 2023 \u2013 all of which would have placed him ninth on the list.<\/p>\n
Where do Ray D’arcy and Claire Byrne come in?<\/p>\n
This is where it gets interesting.<\/p>\n
The 2025 figures also revealed that RT\u00c9 continued to pay D’Arcy and Byrne, even after they left the broadcaster in October 2025.<\/p>\n
For the remainder of the year, D’Arcy received \u20ac50,000, and Byrne received \u20ac47,000.<\/p>\n
Bakhurst said on Friday that the \u20ac97,000 in payments was \u201ctotally the right decision\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said RT\u00c9 wanted to take Byrne off air after she said she was leaving so it could launch its new Radio One schedule, while he characterised the timeline around D\u2019Arcy as \u201ceffectively his notice period\u201d.<\/p>\n
While RT\u00c9 board chair Terence O\u2019Rourke said he was \u201chappy\u201d it was the \u201cright decision\u201d, adding: \u201cThey weren\u2019t doing nothing \u2013 they were available.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anything happened, they would still have been under contract to present.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it was \u201cwise\u201d for the organisation to continue to pay them as there could have been legal issues with not doing so.<\/p>\n
Bakhurst added that the pair had employment rights and a legal fight would have cost a \u201cshedload more\u201d.<\/p>\n
Byrne has said, however, she was \u201chappy to stay on and work\u201d at the organisation until the end of her contract.<\/p>\n
Speaking on her Newstalk programme on Friday, Byrne said: \u201cI resigned from RT\u00c9 in the summer, my contract though, ran until the end of the year, December 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I made it clear, I was happy to stay on and work there until the end of my contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut RT\u00c9 came to me and told me that they wanted me to finish up at the end of October.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was their right and their decision. So that\u2019s how that happened, from my perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
On his podcast, D\u2019Arcy said Bakhurst had done a \u201cgood enough job\u201d explaining the situation, but criticised RT\u00c9 for what he said was a lack of transparency around the director-general\u2019s own remuneration.<\/p>\n
Payment audit and Government backlash<\/p>\n
As a result of all of this, Communications Minister Patrick O’Donovan has called for an audit of payments to RT\u00c9 presenters since 2020.<\/p>\n
Station bosses have also been called to O’Donovan’s department for a meeting on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Those invited include the chair and the director general.<\/p>\n
The minister said on Friday that he wanted to “flesh out” more information on the payments to Byrne and D’Arcy.<\/p>\n
He described the Mooney revelations as a “side issue.<\/p>\n
“The greater issue here is payments in their entirety across the organisation in the period from 2020 onwards and which should have been subjected to an audit.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI also don\u2019t want to know monies without total packages, I think we\u2019ve moved on way too far from that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s why this morning I asked my officials to make it known to RT\u00c9 that not going back to 2020 is not an option \u2013 and by the way, that does not just focus in on Derek Mooney.\u201d<\/p>\n
RT\u00c9 is also due to appear before the Oireachtas Media Committee on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Media Committee chairman, Alan Kelly, and Public Accounts Committee member, Seamus McGrath, called for previous lists to be updated.<\/p>\n
McGrath told Newstalk the revelations were \u201cdamaging\u201d to public trust in RT\u00c9.<\/p>\n
Also speaking on Friday, Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin described the latest RT\u00c9 payments controversy as “difficult to comprehend.”<\/p>\n
Martin said \u201cthe right decision was taken\u201d by RT\u00c9 in clarifying pay of its presenters and added that it was important that confidence in the national broadcaster was retained.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters at the Fianna F\u00e1il Ard Fheis, he also defended the licence fee and proposals to increase the pay of station chief Kevin Bakhurst.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cWe don\u2019t want to be micromanaging RT\u00c9 either, or indeed micromanaging commercial semi-states, so obviously the formal decision has to come to government, but again, there\u2019s a marketplace out there as well and one has to be sensible in how you go about things as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Patrick Kielty of it all<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in the figures, RT\u00c9 explained that Patrick Kielty was paid an additional \u20ac23,980 across 2024 and 2025 as he presented additional programmes beyond his standard contract.Kielty, who recently came to the end of a contract to host the Late Late Show, had said his pay was \u20ac250,000.However, he was paid \u20ac266,323 in 2025 and \u20ac257,657 in 2024.Asked to explain the discrepancy, the national broadcaster said: \u201cRT\u00c9 required Mr Kielty to present some additional programmes beyond his standard contract in these years, and he was paid the agreed fees for this work as included in the published figures.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RT\u00c9 have been in hot water again of late, with Derek Mooney’s exclusion from the broadcaster’s top-10 highest-paid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-432027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}