John Burns: An Post’s David McRedmond fails to conquer RTÉ

Bookies’ favourite David McRedmond is out of the race to be the next director general of RTÉ. The chief executive of An Post was interviewed for the job, we hear, but did not make the shortlist.

Speculation about the imminent appointment now centres on Kevin Bakhurst, an English journalist who has previously been managing director of RTÉ News and deputy director general at the station, and a senior executive with the UK regulator Ofcom since 2016. Bakhurst still takes a keen interest in Ireland, if his Twitter likes are anything to go by.

McRedmond also applied for the RTÉ top job back in 2016, when Dee Forbes was appointed. On that occasion, he wasn’t even interviewed, so this represents progress: perhaps in 2030 he will be shortlisted, and maybe in 2037 he’ll get the gig. After all, his alma mater Gonzaga lost three finals before finally winning the Leinster Schools Senior Cup for the first time this year.

More realistically, McRedmond is likely to be offered a contract extension at An Post, where his seven-year term expires soon. We imagine he will be happy to continue his programme of transformation there, now that his RTÉ ambitions are realistically at an end.

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When fiction imitates real life

Before the TV series Succession was ever made, Ireland had its own version. Greg O’Gorman, then marketing director at the Kilkenny Group, took a legal action in 2016 to stop his mother Marian, the company’s owner and chief executive, from dismissing him. Greg claimed Marian sacked him in a “humiliating manner” at a family meeting. All very Logan Roy.

The case was settled out of court in 2018, and that was the last we heard of it. Until last weekend, when it emerged that Greg O’Gorman’s wife, the journalist Michelle McDonagh, has written a crime thriller entitled There’s Something I Have To Tell You. According to a press release from Hachette, which is due to publish the book next week, the whodunnit features a “wealthy matriarch”, Ursula Kennedy, who is found dead in a slurry pit, and whose last conversation with her son, Rob, ended in a screaming match about money.

Rob’s wife Kate had a difficult relationship with Ursula, we’re told, but “life will be easier now without her every move being controlled by her imperious mother-in-law”.

The novel is set on a farm, rather than a boardroom, and Greg O’Gorman told the Sunday Independent that it’s “absolute fiction”. McDonagh, meanwhile, insists there are no parallels between her husband and the character of the downtrodden son Rob, “because Greg did stand up to his mother”.

Hachette told me that the book was a “work of fiction and bears no resemblance to people living or dead”.

It said it was “looking forward to celebrating its publication next week with Michelle and her family”.

Davy is the butt of Paddy Power’s poker ad

Davy Stockbrokers was the subject of one of Paddy Power’s “funny” ads this week. The bookmaker is a sponsor of the Irish Poker Open Tournament, currently under way at the RDS. One of its ads says “More flops than Ireland’s recent Eurovision entries”, while the caption on a billboard seen around Ballsbridge went: “More bluffers than the Davy headquarters.” Ouch.

Davy wouldn’t comment on the cheeky caption. Contrary to rumours that someone protested to Paddy Power, however, we hear the reaction was more like a wry smile. Which figures. Three years ago, Davy was appointed joint corporate broker to Flutter Entertainment, Paddy Power’s owner. When one of your top clients cracks a joke in public at your expense, what choice do you have but to grin and bear it?

Analysts retraces his tracks on Hostelworld

Over at Davy’s London office, meanwhile, one of its analysts was issuing a rather odd apology. “I did not choose my words wisely yesterday,” David Reynolds admitted in a “clarification” issued to clients on Wednesday. Reynolds was referring back to his analysis of Hostelworld the previous day, in which he speculated about where the online travel agent might go next.

“It may have been concluded that major shareholders have been selling. That is not the case. The disclosed reduction of holdings [is] simply the impact of dilution, as HPS [a lender to HSW] was granted 3.3m warrants,” he, er, explained. “Apologies for the confusion, I should stick to numbers.”

A rare glimpse inside the Kerryman

The Kerryman newspaper is selling “somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 copies”, Mediahuis Ireland chief executive Peter Vandermeersch has revealed. Perhaps unknowingly, the Belgian businessman gave us the first official circulation figure for The Kerryman in well over a decade. The newspaper’s last appearance in the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) was back in 2011, when it was recorded as selling 19,886 copies a week.

The Kerryman was bought by Independent Newspapers way back in September 1972 for the sum of IR£378,000. At the time it was the most successful regional newspaper in the State, with a circulation of 41,790 copies per issue. And there you have a rather graphic illustration of the decline in print newspapers over the last half-century.

What to think of the missing billionaires?

The American business magazine Forbes is taking a leaf out of Jack Charlton’s old book, using a version of the “granny rule” to put all sorts of billionaires in the Irish colours for their annual rankings.

This year’s list features nine “Irish” billionaires, including Shapoor Mistry, John Grayken, John Dorrance and John Armitage – none of whom is very Irish. Mistry automatically became an Irish citizen because his mother, Pat Perin Dubash, was born in Dublin in 1939. Grayken and Dorrance took Irish citizenship for tax reasons, while Armitage donned the green jersey in 2018.

They are joined on the list by the more recognisably Irish Denis O’Brien, the Collison brothers, Dermot Desmond and Eugene Murtagh. But what, one wonders, has become of John Magnier and JP McManus? The Munster magnates were fifth and sixth on the Forbes list in 2021, with fortunes of $2.5 billion and $2.3 billion respectively.

Murtagh’s wealth is given as $2.1 billion by Forbes. Are Magnier and McManus supposed to have dropped about half a billion each in the meantime? We doubt it.

Door opens for RTÉ in the UK

Irish radio stations will be able to apply for licences to broadcast in Britain, once a new Media Bill is passed there. The bill gives Ofcom the power to license overseas radio services for the first time – “specifically those based in the Republic of Ireland”.

An explanatory note with the bill says that “the secretary of state intends to specify Ireland as a qualifying country with the effect that RTÉ (the Irish national broadcaster) and other Irish commercial and community radio station operators can apply for digital licences for their radio services, and ultimately for those services to be broadcast in the UK”.

RTÉ recently announced that broadcasts of Radio 1 on the long wave frequency will end on April 14. So, might it look for a UK licence next year when the Media Bill is passed? A spokesman said: “RTÉ currently has no plans to launch new digital radio services in the UK. RTÉ's radio services and podcasts are now available to a global audience on smart speakers, online and through the RTÉ Radio Player on mobile devices.”