Broadcaster Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly will appear before two Oireachtas Committee hearings next Tuesday.
Members of the Public Accounts Committee met privately on Thursday morning and agreed to issue a formal invitation to the pair for Tuesday 11th, along with another invite for RTÉ executives two days later on Thursday 13th, the day the Dáil rises for the summer recess.
Later, in a letter to the Media Committee, Hayes Solicitors, representing Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly, said they “note that the Public Accounts Committee has scheduled our meeting with them between 11am and 2pm, next Tuesday.”
“We would greatly appreciate if our meeting with your committee could be arranged immediately after our meeting with the Public Accounts Committee.”
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Politicians on the Media Committee will facilitate the demand, it is understood, and are working to ensure they have a committee room available to ensure it happens.
The hearings will be highly anticipated as politicians say it is vital they hear Mr Tubridy‘s and Mr Kelly’s account of how payments to Mr Tubridy came to be wrongly reported by the station.
Mr Kelly and Mr Tubridy will be questioned around misstated payments made by RTÉ to Mr Tubridy between 2017 and 2022.
In their first letter via their solicitor, sent to the Oireachtas Committee on Media earlier this week, the pair said they “wish to fully co-operate and assist” with the committee’s investigations.
It also said that both parties would welcome the opportunity to set out their positions and take “appropriate questioning” from committees.
A booklet of relevant documents will be prepared in advance of Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly’s appearance, and this information will be circulated among TDs before the meetings.
Beyond the Renault deal, politicians will be looking for a clear explanation for the €120,000 in undeclared payments to Mr Tubridy between 2017 and 2019. This sum is included in the €345,000 in hidden payments to the former Late Late Show host that were never declared in a line of public statements down through the years. Grant Thornton is currently examining the €120k issue, but it is not known exactly when they will report back.
They will be asked why the two further top-up payments, made on foot of a commercial deal with Renault which was underwritten by RTÉ, were labelled as consultancy fees and who made this direction.
It is also highly likely that TDs will want to ask Mr Tubridy whether he knew that auditors raised concerns about the top-ups in early March, and whether this factored into his decision to step down from the Late Late Show.
There was a suggestion on behalf of Hayes Solicitor that the two could meet with the committees privately at first, and publicly after, but members of both committees told The Irish Times that in the name of transparency they are keen for all meetings to be public.
