Montrose Manor
The Upstairs Downstairs Mentality at RTE
As I set off for the office to write this week’s newsletter, my 15 year old said, it’s not going to be about Ryan Tubridy again, is it?
And I do feel like we have returned to the subject of RTE quite a lot, but wherever you’re reading this, there is a fascinating story in what happens when a public service broadcaster finds itself in deep water.
In some ways, there are parallels between the battle the BBC is facing with the Tory Government, although their situation revolves more around perceptions of bias in coverage, promoted by the Government while senior Tory figures are actively involved in the BBC at Board level.
More Drama Looms
This week promises to be another big week of drama for RTE, as the Communications Minister Catherine Martin has found herself in the spotlight, after a public refusal to express confidence in the Chair of RTE.
The Chair, Siun Ni Raghallaigh, then resigned and a flurry of new headlines questioning the chain of events over more Executive level payouts followed.
The Minister is due to appear before the Oireachtas Media Committee on Tuesday, accompanied by the marvelously named former civil servant Katherine Licken. The questioning is expected to focus on when and how the Department were informed about the latest round of executive exit packages.
All of this turmoil continues, as the State Broadcaster is suffering dramatic drops in licence fee income, which is not exactly surprising given the continual bad news about the organisation, and it’s prevented any decision on either a public funding bailout, or the announcement of the RTE survival plan that Director General Kevin Bakhurst had been working on.
The Rounding Issue
It was a detail in the Sunday Times reporting though that really caught my eye. It’s a relatively minor technical point I suppose from an accounting point of view, but RTE recorded the exit payment for their former Chief Financial Officer, Breda O’Keeffe as €400,000, when in fact the amount was €450,000.
Why is that?
Well, RTE says it’s practice is to round down sums to the nearest €100,000, so €450,000 was treated as €400K instead of say, €450K, or indeed rounded up to €500k
And, it’s not clear whether the same practice was extended to other packages and how they were reported. And given that the current running total for redundancy package at Executive Level is almost €4 million since 2012, that could be a significant amount of money.
One Person’s Rounding Error is another’s Career
Let’s just step back for a minute. The starting salary, for an RTE radio producer, is about €51,000, that’s for a full years work, producing audio, coaching talent, devising radio and broadcasting it to a national audience.
Or, in RTE language, when it comes to what it hilariously terms “VEPs” (Voluntary Exit Packages) for Executives, it’s just a rounding error.
That really sums up the issue in RTE for me, I’ve worked there, I’ve been a Senior Manager in the Radio Division, and I know how it works and it’s not right.
Upstairs Downstairs in Montrose Manor
It’s not dissimilar to the 70’s TV show “Upstairs, Downstairs”, or it’s more modern incarnation “Downton Abbey”, there are two parallel worlds. One, which is downstairs, is where committed and talented people work hard every day to deliver public service broadcasting for a wide national audience.
The other exists in a parallel universe, perched up above the common folk, where senior executives collect private sector salaries for public service work and when their time is up, they can happily walk away with multiples of their 6 figure salaries and straight into a commercial organisation.
The people on the floors below don’t have that luxury, they work in a radio centre that is a literal relic of the 70’s and have been waiting for over a year now for some kind of plan that will give them comfort that they have jobs and security.
Every version of a survival plan lists off hundreds of heads to be cut, but they’re really cutting the wrong heads, instead of 9 producers, why not lose another senior executive at a saving of €450,000?
Or in the casual manner of the Director General’s own explanation, simply not replace some more of the €200,000 a year roles, that were deemed no longer necessary, and sure you’ll have recouped the payout in just 12 months.
I’m genuinely surprised that the staff in RTE aren’t outside the Executive offices every single day with placards listing off the names and amounts that have been handed out as “VEPs” and demanding that Ireland’s public service broadcaster starts to take a more realistic approach to it’s senior level VIPs.