Ryan Tubridy and RTÉ clash over request to see station’s pay-scandal files | Irish Independent
Flor Lynch
Ryan Tubridy and RTÉ clash over request to see station’s pay-scandal files
Director general Kevin Bakhurst presses former Donnybrook star on documents request during private meetingData watchdog to rule on appeal by former RTÉ presenter on ‘very straightforward query’Montrose ‘disagrees’ that Tubridy and agent Noel Kelly ‘are entitled to more material’
Ryan Tubridy and Kevin Bakhurst clash over demand to see RTÉ scandal files
Spare a thought for poor Kevin Bakhurst. The RTÉ director general couldn’t go for pints with his best friend Marty Morrissey in O’Donoghue’s on Dublin’s Merrion Row for fear of meeting the ghost of ditching past.
Ryan Tubridy continues to stalk the corridors of Montrose. He was even let back into the building for half an hour last weekend to talk to Miriam O’Callaghan about his new life.
But he had already met Bakhurst – for the first time since being dumped by the broadcaster three years ago in the wake of the payments scandal – when they had a coffee last October.
The Donnybrook grapevine was abuzz when the former Late Late Show presenter and the RTÉ chief had their summit. “RTÉ has no comment,” a spokesperson told the Irish Independent.
Dropping the cloak-and-dagger act, Bakhurst is now explaining why the previously top-secret meeting happened.
“I want him to be comfortable around Ireland if he bumps into me,” he told The Sunday Times.
Opening the diplomatic doors, the meeting came a few months after Tubridy finally paid back the outstanding €150,000 he received from RTÉ for two promotional events for Renault that never took place.
However, Tubridy and his agent, Noel Kelly, are still pursuing a legal route to obtain files from RTÉ about them from during the scandal. The pair are seeking information surrounding internal communications from June to August 2023.
The data request was made in November 2023, following Tubridy’s departure from Montrose.
RTÉ released some, but not all, documents in March 2024. But Tubridy and Kelly were not satisfied with the reasons for rejecting the rest of the request, and appealed to the data watchdog in April 2024.
The matter has been bouncing over and back between RTÉ and the Data Protection Commissioner for the last two years, which partly explains the mounting legal costs.
Both sides differ on the impasse over the demand to see the scandal files.
The celebrated Donnybrook grapevine suggests Bakhurst wanted Tubridy to drop the data request.
“It’s thought he was asking Ryan: ‘Can you back off on that?’,” a source said.
RTÉ doesn’t say what was said, but Bakhurst admits bringing up the data request over coffee.
“This issue, and other issues, were raised and discussed during the private meeting,” an RTÉ spokesperson said.
“In response to the data access request, RTÉ has provided material requested by solicitors on behalf of Ryan Tubridy and Noel Kelly, at a substantial cost in excess of €100,000. The issue that remains outstanding is that they believe they are entitled to more material and RTÉ disagrees.”
RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst. Photo: PA
But the Tubridy camp has a different interpretation. “This is now a matter for the Data Protection Commission, which is examining RTÉ’s response to what was a very straightforward query and we look forward to their decision on this matter,” a spokesperson for the solicitors representing Kelly and Tubridy said.
Tubridy told O’Callaghan the motivation behind the data access request was mere “curiosity”, rather than with a view to taking future legal action against RTÉ.
The internal files from the scandals, when Tubridy said he had “become the face of a national scandal”, would be intriguing reading.
Tubridy has used his appearance on an episode of Virgin Media’s The Assembly to get back out there talking about life, love and fall from grace. It’s hard to tell if it’s a redemption story or a rewriting of history. Clearly he still has a beef with the RTÉ board.
“I could have been communicated better with, at the time, by the RTÉ board, but it all happened like it was a hijack, and it was deeply unpleasant and hollowed me out,” he told the RTÉ Guide.
Tubridy was named and shamed 16 times in the original statement from the RTÉ board in June 2023 on the understatement of his wages by €345,000 over the course of six years.
Collins’s report does not blame Tubridy: quite the contrary
At the time, RTÉ was keeping silent about blowing €2.27m on Toy Show: the Musical, wasting €3.6m on a partly failed IT project, not to mention the flip-flops, pay-offs and freebies.
The understatements can be divided in two. His earnings for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 were off by €120,000, which was examined by three reports.
Former RTÉ chief financial officer Richard Collins’s internal review for then RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh in June 2023 found an unpaid bonus was “erroneously” subtracted from his published earnings. “There is no logic for this,” the review said.
Collins’s report does not blame Tubridy: quite the contrary. The RTÉ board was in possession of this report before Tubridy was mentioned 16 times as the villain of the drama.
A formal investigation by Grant Thornton in August 2023 “suggests a hypothesis” that “on the balance of probabilities adjustments” were made for three years to show “revised earnings” below a figure of €500,000”.
Likewise, the Dáil Public Accounts Committee reported in March 2024 that “any objective assessment could not discount the possibility that the figures were deliberately misrepresented by RTÉ”.
In other words, RTÉ put his earnings below €500,000 in the annual Top 10 presenters list. Tubridy has acknowledged he should have been more thorough in his supervision of his own finances.
Beyond not publicly stating the salary of the top brass his own employers had published was not correct, Tubridy cannot really be blamed for that part.
However, when it comes to the second batch of secret payments from 2020 to 2022, Tubridy’s tale is a bit more woolly.
When the presenter was supposed to be taking a pay cut, a plan was hatched to provide an alternative compensatory income stream.
Tubridy was “guaranteed by RTÉ an additional annual income of €75,000,” which was supposedly coming from a commercial partner. The Renault deal via the barter account was born, with Tubridy being paid €75,000 each for 2020, 2021 and 2022, even though he didn’t carry out the corporate work in the latter two years. Tubridy said his agent wanted to get the best deal for him and this was all part of a contract negotiation.
Tubridy blames the board for pushing him out, rather than Bakhurst
“It was a commercial deal between us and another company. And I’d always thought that was the company was going to pay that,” Tubridy told O’Callaghan.
Now it does stretch credibility for Tubridy to seek to play the innocent.
The presenter says: “I always take responsibility for the stuff I should be responsible for.”
But it was his efforts to claim he was effectively exonerated when an investigation report on RTÉ’s finances was published that put the kibosh on his return to the national airwaves.
Tubridy blames the board for pushing him out, rather than Bakhurst.
“I think the board might have been a little bit enthusiastic about my departure. I think, Noel Kelly and I, were very happy that I was vindicated, and not everyone was happy with the vindication,” he told The Irish Times.
RTÉ has rejected this accusation.
Again, this is where the data request will fill in the blanks around the internal machinations about Tubridy and Kelly.
During his marathon appearance at two Oireachtas committees, Tubridy fired shots at the RTÉ hierarchy. He accused RTÉ of putting out statements that “created a fog of confusion over what I was paid and when I was paid, what I knew and when I knew”.
He said “full transparency and disclosure on RTÉ’s part would have avoided this”. His statement to the committees concluded: “I am also hopeful that I will soon get back on air to do the job I love.”
Tubridy now claims Bakhurst may have done him a favour when he didn’t bring him back, given that his life has changed so much. But there’s another chapter to come if he gets the files from RTÉ’s summer of scandals.