RTÉ paid Ray D’Arcy and Claire Byrne combined €97k after they stopped working for broadcaster

RTÉ DIRECTOR GENERAL Kevin Bakhurst has defended paying a combined total of €97,000 to Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy after the duo stopped working for the broadcaster towards the end of year.

Byrne announced last August that she would be swapping RTÉ for Newstalk and presented her last Radio 1 show on 31 October last.

She was RTÉ’s highest paid presenter last year, with a salary of €280,000.

D’Arcy meanwhile said he was “hugely” disappointed in how RTÉ handled his departure, which the broadcaster announced on 9 October – he was RTÉ’s fifth-highest paid presenter at the time, on close to €220,000.

A day after D’Arcy’s departure, RTÉ announced a major overhaul of its weekday schedule.

Speaking on RTÉ Primetime last night, chair of the RTÉ board Terence O’Rourke remarked that their contracts “said they were contracted to present until the end of the year, and there were different decisions made about when they would stop presenting”.

He added: “If we had ceased to pay them, I think we would have had some interesting solicitors’ letters and all the rest, so I think it was the right thing for the organisation.”

When it was put to O’Rourke that RTÉ had paid the two considerable money to “do nothing for a couple of months,” O’Rourke said: “They weren’t doing nothing, they were available.

“If anything had happened, they would have still been under contract to present. So, it wasn’t that they were doing nothing, they were available.”

Speaking today on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Bakhurst backed up O’Rourke’s comments.

“It was totally the right decision and Terence is totally right about presenters.

“Although they’re paid a lot of money, they also have contracts, like anyone who has employment rights in Ireland, and if they have a contract, we need to respect their contracts.”

Bakhurst added that the same decision was made in relation to both presenters but “for different reasons”.

“Claire was leaving, and she stayed on after she told us she was leaving.

“But we wanted to take her off-air to launch the new Radio 1 schedule, so that was our decision. And in the case of Ray, this was effectively his notice period.”

D’Arcy has since launched his own podcast.

Bakhurst said both presenters were available to work until January of this year but that RTÉ “wanted to launch the new schedule”.

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“Claire had told us she was leaving anyway,” added Bakhurst, “so, we went to get ahead and launch that.

“People have contractual rights… if they’re paid a lot of money.

“The only thing I would say is that across the Radio 1 schedule, we are now paying less for the total of all the presenters than we were with the old schedule, so we are constantly trying to drive costs down.”

When pressed on this, Bakhurst said: “Everyone has employment rights, and if we decide that we’re going to stop someone working for RTÉ, you can’t just chop off their salary.

“People have notice periods and you have to abide by that.

“If people are paid a lot of money, unfortunately, it costs money, but we have to abide by employment rights.

“And if we hadn’t and we got into a legal fight, it would have cost us a shed load more money than it did.”

Meanwhile, Byrne commented on the issue on her Newstalk show this morning.

“We’re going to get straight to the elephant in the room,” said Byrne.

“The latest on the RTÉ payments and spending and my name is on that list of top 10 highest paid presenters last year, before I left.”

She then noted that RTÉ “paid me for two months towards the end of last year, when I wasn’t on air with them”.

“I just want to explain to you how that happened,” Byrne told listeners.

“I resigned from RTÉ in the summer. My contract, though, ran until the end of the year and I made it clear I was happy to stay on and work there until the end of my contract.

“But RTÉ told me they wanted me to finish up at the end of October – that was their right and their decision.

“So that’s how that happened, from my perspective.”

Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan today said this is “something I’d like to flesh out a bit more”.

“We’re trying to rebuild confidence, trying to get people to buy the television licence, trying to get people to have faith in the public service broadcaster.

“So here we are yet again, Groundhog Day, explaining something that, to be quite honest, I thought after giving the company three quarters of a billion euro, that we had moved on from that.”

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