RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

Not everything funded is going to be to everyone's taste, but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And let's not forget ......"Ryan Tubridy said if they are not called upon for the six remaining gigs, the money will be handed back." (per RTE report on his original appearance, which he appears to have forgotton about, as has the media).

Was Mr Collins the Chief Financial Officer who had no idea what he was being paid

probably understandable that he was left out of financial negotiations

I once wrote a cheque out to the Collector General for ~37,000. I can now see it was well spent.

I have been on the Collector Generals mailing list for 20 years

It disgusts me where my money ends up

Lookit……If the current mob are largely still intact John Q Taxpayer will still be butt reamed.

Any Govt who gets rid of the current licence fee process and replaces it with yearly contributions from general taxation to thi llot deserves to be kicked out of office rapido.

We have seen and can still see the stuff this lot got up to being fast and loose with the taxpayers dollah while winkelling in their own grubby little sidelines on the strength of a public persona.

They want to ‘geld’ JQT so they can work their own little fifedom away from prying eyes and continue the ‘omertà’ style of management so beloved by Tony Soprano and his friends.

It’s getting very like that right now.…… we need to stay awake.

Can't wait for the FFG people to claim that she and SF are being "populist".

It is the only logical way of saving RTE's public service function. Break up the company and let RTE's commercial arm sink or swim in the market without licence fee or exchequer funding. Think that people like Tubridy are worth tens of thousands of Euro per month? Then let them f*ck off to some broadcaster who will pay them that and then, when they inevitably begin to lose audience numbers, let those broadcasters deal with reducing their salaries or firing them. They'll soon be fired if they are not pulling their weight.

And as for the RTE "management", the same thing can be done. The prize for wasting money on fiascos like "Toyshow - The Musical" shouldn't be a transfer and a pat on the back in commiseration about it not working out. These people have to learn the value of money extorted from licence fee payers and the exchequer.

Regards...jmcc

I'm going with -

Noel: Look Dee, whatever you do, you do not want to lose Ryan on your watch

Dee: Jesus Noel, you're right. What does he want?

Noel: 75k by 3, no cuts - Don't care how it's done but I'd suggest CMS through the UK

Dee: Okay, leave it with me. Jesus, thanks Noel

Noel

The Mods are volunteers. It’s likely they have better things to be doing on a Saturday afternoon.

Unlike the total melt that went to the trouble of signing up for yet another new account to post that primary-school level attempt at an insult. And me, of course.

It is a serious problem with no easy solution. The "broadcast" tax has been floated for decades by whichever government was in power. The problem for broadcasters like RTE is that their market shares have been falling continually and the way that people "consume" media has changed. Originally, RTE had the Irish TV market to itself and there was minimal competition from the UK and NI channels. Along comes cable TV in the 1970s and the figures begin to drop. The cost of television sets remained quite high so most homes didn't have two TVs. Then the costs of the TVs started to fall in the 1980s and families began to buy second TVs for the kids. The kids didn't want to watch RTE. Satellite TV kicked in towards the end of the 1980s and began to be carried on the cable TV networks so it was more competition for RTE.

The radio side of things for RTE was even worse. In the 1970s, the Pirate Radio stations started up and almost every town in Ireland had at least one pirate radio station and people listened to them instead of RTE. To try to deal with the problem, RTE launched 2FM and it was, for a while, popular. The FF local radio legislation nearly killed off a whole industry. Some RTE DJs proved that they could survive in commercial radio. Could Tubridy have survived in such a competitive environment? No. As soon as he got Gerry Ryan's slot (G Ryan being one of a kind), the slot lost about 40% of its audience. The way that Irish broadcasters weren't falling over themselves trying to get Tubridy with huge salaries showed how screwed up RTE really was in terms of both management and salaries.

The big problem with a "broadcast" tax is that it is unfair and is not based on consumption. Someone with no TV would have to pay it and someone who has no radio would also have to pay it. There's no feedback system in it that would allow for consumption of media to be measured. (It might be possible with Virgin's cable network but that would create a lot of privacy problems.) The way that TV and radio audiences are guesstimated have their own problems. If Tubridy was as popular as the RTE/NKM propaganda claimed, the audience for the radio slot should have dropped like a stone after he was removed. It didn't.

There are two possibilities for that. The first is that the way that audiences are measured is not accurate. The second is that many people don't so much listen to radio as are subjected to it as a background noise. Someone on a bus trip might be considered a "listener" but they have no control over the choice of station. That's generally up to the bus driver.

The FFG government already has a lot of problems and a backlash against a broadcast tax would probably equal that of the protests against the Water Tax. RTE's credibility and that of its management was destroyed this year. At this stage very few people would want to pay to keep people like Tubridy paid the salaries that they had come to expect. The licence fee revenue was down 20 million Euro this year according to an article in the Indo. People may not want to pay the licence fee in 2024. The upside for Tubridy fans is that they will be able to listen to him in January without having to contribute to his salary.

Regards...jmcc