Tubridy

We are being taken for fools.

It’s a sort of shuffling circling of wagons but a circling nevertheless.  It is hard for RTE ‘star’personnel to defend Tubridy but even harder to round on him, or their common paymaster RTE, without opening questions about their own levels of remuneration. In fact, the main thing that marks the privileged constellation of ‘star’ presenters is their stellar and absurd levels of pay. That is the most starry thing by far about them. They make more than the Taoiseach of the country.  But then the Taoiseach, the political leader of a country of some five million, earns more than the British Prime Minister whose citizens number some 68 million. So this discussion potentially could be very ramified and raise uncomfortable questions for the entire elite class in Irish public life. 

The focus so far is on the lack of transparency involved. In other words the core issue about elite entitlement and greed is sidestepped by concerted efforts to keep the public’s attention on ethically questionable accounting operations and opaque invoicing. None of this of course can be laid at the door of the beneficiary who blathers away on the national airwaves for two hours or so a day to bag more than double the pay of the Taoiseach ( who is himself, let us not forget, rather excessively paid in comparison with his peers in other countries)

So it’s small wonder that the public discussions around this scandal are so muted. RTE have tried to garner kudos for their willingness to cover the matter as extensively as they have, and by implication, openly. This is simply damage limitation. The mute button may not be on but the rhetorical sound is definitely dialled down as much as they dare as they continue to monitor, and of course manipulate, the national mood.

The afternoon call-in programme presented by Joe Duffy revealed a surprising level of support for the beleaguered Tubridy. More than one might expect to reflect public opinion accurately.  This kind of airtime vox pop is of course filtered and should not be taken necessarily as balanced on a issue such as this which touches the self-interest of both the broadcaster and the presenter in question. Joe Duffy’s expression of sympathy for Tubridy, tentative and tangential as it was, should be enough to raise the hackles of many of those listening in, especially if they had been lining up to have their say on the programme. According to Duffy, Tubridy is ‘entitled to privacy’ like everyone else. Surely, in this matter, not as entitled as the compelled, TV licence paying public are to answers and indeed a root and branch evaluation of the role of ‘public broadcasting’ itself in a digital age?

Another well known presenter saw Tubridy, as he persists in seeing himself, as an innocent and passive player in the drama, who committed a mere ‘error of judgment’. It’s as if all this extra loot came his way without his asking for it or knowing very little if anything about the mechanism that lobbed it into his bank account year in year out. The fact that the bonus payment involved is considerably more than other staff journalists and backroom personnel earn annually in RTE wouldn’t have occurred to him in a month of blue moons.

Quite simply, we are being taken for fools. RTE staff can’t be manipulated and it is good to see them reframing the issue for what it is at core, a question of money not merely of arcane and opaque accounting instruments. It’s unfair to them but it is even more unfair to the public at large, more and more of whom are forced to pay for a service they don’t use. 

RTE’s formal exercise in damage limitation has if anything only served to provoke more outrage.  Nobody had the full picture, we are told, least of all perhaps the beneficiary. Yet, the small print tells us that it was the beneficiary’s agent who pressed the deal through, leaving RTE on the hook for 75, 000 euro a year, should the commercial sponsor pull out which is of course what happened. The report also, rather inconsistently, informed us that there was initially some ‘pushback from RTE’.  However, such are the checks and balances in RTE, that those who pushed back didn’t even know they were overruled in the end.  Or that is what we are asked to believe? Either way it’s an appalling indictment of a public body that regards the public with contempt and dances to the demands of cosseted favourites.

There is a question about the kind of leverage involved in driving trough such a deal.   There are many more dots to join.  An independent, external review is useful but the review that matters most will take place in the public square. The role of public broadcasting needs to be reevaluated and reconfigured in an age where platforms of entertainment and information have undergone a revolution. Only the privileged and entitled elite will resist. They are the true regressives for all their right- on, woke as a cock at dawn claims to progressiveness.