The chairperson of the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee, Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley has called for the former director general of RTÉ Dee Forbes to come back before the committee to explain the payments to Ryan Tubridy.
Mr Stanley was speaking on Newstalk Breakfast and on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland when he said the national broadcaster had been involved in “dodgy accountancy practices".
The details which had emerged on Thursday were shocking and “not a pretty picture”. There were a lot of questions that needed to be answered, and the PAC had been misled by senior staff in RTE on a number of occasions, he said.
The finances of RTÉ had been “very tricky” over the last few years, he said. There had been a commitment to reducing pay, but it appeared that Ryan Tubridy had in fact received more than what had been publicly disclosed.
It would be helpful if Dee Forbes came before the PAC again to “give a full account” as she was the person who had been on the RTÉ management team. Mr Stanley said he accepted that sometimes a witness before the committee could mistakenly give the wrong information, but when details were given in writing “you expect it to be accurate".
“When you get that a number of times and what happened here is that we were actually lied to on a number of occasions. So it would be helpful if going forward, Dee Forbes came out and set the record straight about this.
“What I want to know is that who set up this dodgy accountancy practices? Who set it off? Who signed off on it? And who knew about it and why?”
Mr Stanley said he had spoken to some RTÉ staff on Thursday and they were “very, very annoyed about all of this".
Former RTÉ group commercial director Willie O’Reilly told Newstalk Breakfast that he was “utterly shocked” at the revelations.
Who thought this was a good idea?
Advertisement
“Who thought this was a good idea?”
Mr O’Reilly agreed that answers should be given to the PAC and there should be both internal and external independent investigations into what had happened.
“This is really questionable and seemingly unethical behaviour.”
Mr Stanley told Morning Ireland that there needed to be accountability. “What we have here is fraudulent accountancy practices. This is not the way you do business. When you deliberately seek to hide money, when you deliberately seek to misrepresent accounts for whatever sum of money, that's actually fraudulent accountancy. This isn't happening in any kind of a dodgy backstreet operation. This isn't Dell Boy and Rodney. This is actually the national broadcaster.
“I'm personally very, very disappointed because we've already had senior staff including Dee Forbes in front of our committee a number of times in the last three years. And we were given firm commitments that pay across the top ten presenters was being reduced. Not alone did that not happen in this case, in actual fact, €75,000 has been added on, €50,000 has been added on.”
Mr Stanley said that it was his understanding that Ms Forbes would remain on the payroll of RTÉ until July 10th, so she was technically still an employee of the station and as such should return to appear before the PAC to explain what had happened. “There are questions that need to be answered.”
“What we need to see here and now, is a very upfront 100 per cent disclosure, not bits and pieces, not news management, not information in drips and drabs? We need people to come out that knew about this.
It's complete fraudulent accountancy.
Advertisement
“This isn't very complicated. This needs to be sorted out quickly. We need to all the facts upon the table and people are held accountable.
“This is absolutely shocking stuff. What's going on here? It's complete concealment. It's complete fraudulent accountancy. I have never seen anything like it in my days looking at accounts of different organisations. Even if it's only the local residents' association, it wouldn't work like this.”
