‘Bottomless pockets’ can lure more presenters from RTÉ

RTÉ's competitors are "talking to other people who they want to lure away from us", the broadcaster's deputy director-general Kevin Bakhurst told an Oireachtas committee last week.

Ooh. How might they do such luring? The money expected to flow back to the media sector will probably help a few signatures along, though it remains to be seen whether this cash will be courtesy of a genuine advertising-led recovery or the gift of "people with bottomless pockets", as one TD put it. The "sky did not fall in" when Pat Kenny defected from RTÉ to Newstalk, another member of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications observed. So far, the radio listenership figures do confirm that the sky above Montrose is intact.

Still, there were a few cracks of thunder and lightning about last summer, as RTÉ’s news and current affairs heavyweights speculated that “transfer season” was not over and wondered who among them would be next. To lose one high-profile presenter may be regarded as misfortune, to lose Joe Duffy as well would look like carelessness.

RTÉ director-general Noel Curran says he firmly believes "that five of the top 10 paid presenters in this country are not on RTÉ". Because commercial broadcasters obviously don't have the same requirement to publish how much they pay their top faces and voices, we will have to guess that he means five of these six merry men: Pat Kenny, Today FM trio Ian Dempsey, Ray D'Arcy and Matt Cooper, George Hook and Vincent Browne.

Of this lot, Browne is the odd one out, making his crust on television rather than radio and working for someone other than Denis O’Brien.

National commercial radio stations will pay whatever they believe they must in order to incrementally increase their market share, which is why these presenters’ place in the pay rankings will be higher than their spot in the list of the most listened-to programmes in Ireland.

Only seven of the top 30 radio shows in Ireland come from outside RTÉ, with D'Arcy proving the most popular, taking joint 14th place. The research for the Joint National Listenership Survey is carried out over the course of a rolling one-year period, so the most recent figures do not capture the full extent of Kenny's audience, but for the moment the only Newstalk programme in the top 30 list is The Right Hook, in 29th place.

Is the salary of Drivetime's Mary Wilson, who has 242,000 listeners, commensurate with those of her time-slot competitors Cooper (160,000 listeners) and Hook (130,000)? Given Wilson did not feature in RTÉ's last run-down of its top 10 highest-paid presenters, the answer would seem to be no.

The argument, one of many used to express disbelief at RTÉ’s boom-time cheques, is that people listen to Radio 1 primarily because it is Radio 1, whereas only the sheer charisma of the personalities on the national commercial stations could possibly persuade listeners to “move the dial”.

Of course, licence-fee funded broadcasters are rightfully subject to more scrutiny on how much they pay “the talent”, though that scrutiny is perhaps out of whack with the proportion of RTÉ operating costs – less than 1 per cent – that goes into the bank accounts of the top 10.

Nonetheless, Terry Wogan, back when he hosted the most listened-to radio show in the UK, didn't let the fact that he was employed by a public service broadcaster get in the way of justifying his salary on the basis of his audience. "You don't believe that stuff, do you?" he said in 2006 on reports that his salary was in the region of £800,000. "If the number quoted to me is correct, I'm being underpaid. I've got eight million listeners."

It would be a brave RTÉ hack who, buoyed by some recent success, went into their boss’s office and attempted to replicate Wogan’s deadpan expression of self-worth. The years of “co-operation” with Curran’s post-boom corrections to presenter pay are not officially over, just as the hunt for operational savings across the organisation, thanks to the interest of the Government’s NewERA efficiency-seekers, is not yet complete.

Presenter contracts have been reduced "from 21 per cent to 68 per cent", according to Curran, while the next top 10 list, due to be published in late 2014 or early 2015, should show a lower overall pay tally. The grey cloud for RTÉ is that in a more fluid, competitive market, some of its most experienced, ascendant or slightly under-the-radar talent might be given good cause to go and knock on the door and say, "thanks for everything, but Denis O'Brien / UTV / TV3 / UK broadcaster X thinks I'm worth this much".