RTÉ chair was told in June station’s treatment of Tubridy payments had ‘no logic’

RTÉ has said there are no new revelations in a news report on Saturday disclosing the contents of an internal communication within the national broadcaster concerning payments to Ryan Tubridy.

The communication, from the then chief financial officer, Richard Collins, to the chair of RTÉ, Siún Ní Raghallaigh, was sent four days prior to the public statement from the RTÉ board on June 22nd that ignited the controversy that ended Tubridy’s career at the station.

In the confidential memo, Mr Collins told the RTÉ chair that the public underreporting of Tubridy’s earnings by €120,000 for the period 2017 to 2019 was due to RTÉ “erroneously” crediting a bonus that was due to Tubridy against the fees that were actually paid to him for the three years concerned. “There is no logic for this,” he said.

In the statement issued four days later, the board said it was investigating how Tubridy’s earnings for the period 2017 to 2022 had been publicly underreported by a total of €345,000.

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It said a review had ascertained that Tubridy’s earnings had been publicly under-reported for the years 2020 to 2022 by an amount totalling €205,250, (even though at that stage no public statement had been made about Tubridy’s earnings for 2022). These are the payments associated with Tubridy and the sponsor of the Late Late Show.

The board said that a second review, by Grant Thornton, was investigating how Tubridy’s earnings came to be publicly understated by €120,000 for the period 2017 to 2019. It did not indicate that it appeared that the fault for the underreporting of these payments lay with RTÉ and not the presenter.

The Irish Independent secured a copy of the communication from Mr Collins to Ms Ní Raghallaigh on foot of a Freedom of Information Request.

The Grant Thornton report into the 2017 to 2019 payments was subsequently published and showed that, as had already been said by Mr Collins prior to the start of the controversy, that Tubridy had no role in how his earnings came to be under-reported.

In a response to the Irish Independent story on Saturday, RTÉ said “these are not new revelations” and that the communication with Ms Ní Raghallaigh was “a preliminary internal review” that had been forwarded to Grant Thornton, which was conducting a “formal, fact-based review.”

The email communication was “not concealed,“ it said, adding that it was central to the Grant Thornton review, which was published once completed and provided to the two Oireachtas committees that held hearings into the Tubridy controversy.

The Collins communication was not among the material provided to these committees, it confirmed, but said hundreds of documents and emails had been.

A spokesman for Tubridy said he had no comment.