80% of Goss readers believe Patrick Kielty’s Late Late Show salary should be declared.
While RTÉ declare their talent’s salaries two years retrospectively, many TV viewers are calling for Patrick’s salary to be released now.
RTÉ was plunged into chaos last week when it was revealed that Ryan Tubridy’s earnings were publicly understated by €345,000 over the last six years.
The issue was identified during a routine audit of RTÉ’s 2022 accounts, prompting an independent review of the matter.
Last Thursday, the RTÉ Board issued an apology over the error, and later Ryan also apologised for not questioning RTÉ over his published earnings.
The scandal resulted in the suspension of RTÉ’s Director General Dee Forbes, who has since resigned from her role.
The earnings of RTÉ’s top presenters will now be subject to an external review to see if their reported salaries match their actual salaries.
A host of the RTÉ’s highest earning presenters have since publicly disclosed their earnings – including Claire Byrne, Miriam O’Callaghan, Joe Duffy and Ray D’Arcy, in a bid to prove their transparency.
Goss.ie conducted a poll via our Instagram Stories and Twitter on Tuesday evening, in which we asked our readers whether they believe Patrick Kielty’s salary for hosting the Late Late Show should be publicly declared.
The results found that just over 79% (79.854%) of our readers were in agreement that both RTÉ and the Belfast native should be transparent about his earnings.
In contrast, almost 20% (19.943%) of Goss.ie readers don’t believe it’s necessary for both parties to declare the father-of-two’s undoubtedly lucrative salary for his upcoming Late Late Show hosting gig.
Just 0.6% of our readers were unsure what their beliefs on the matter were.
Goss.ie has a core audience of women, aged 25-35, with women aged 34-44 our second most popular readership. On Instagram, Goss.ie has 94% female followers, with the largest amount of followers in Dublin, followed by Cork, Limerick and Galway.
Over 3,000 readers gave their opinion on the matter via our social media accounts.
On Tuesday evening, RTÉ released what they had promised to be a “comprehensive statement” addressing the misstating of payments to their highest earning presenter Ryan Tubridy from 2020 to 2022.
The full statement, from the Interim Deputy Director-General Adrian Lynch, can be read here.
Some of the key points in the broadcaster’s statement include:
- The statement claims that no member of the RTÉ Executive Board, other than the Director General, had all the necessary information in order to understand that the publicly declared figures for Ryan Tubridy could have been wrong.
- The commercial deal between Ryan Tubridy and Ryan’s agent was arranged through RTÉ’s Commerical Director, allegedly at the direction of Dee Forbes.
- A credit note for the extra payments were issued at the request of Dee Forbes and Ryan was unaware of such credit note.
- Negotiations for Ryan’s new contract and salary, took place from March 2020 until October 2020, during the COVID pandemic. Mainly over Zooms and email correspondence.
The statement, which was due to be released at 3pm but was delayed until after 5pm, does not explain the under-reporting of Ryan’s pay between 2017 and 2019, as it is the subject of a separate review.
It’s important to note that, at the time of publishing this piece, Dee Forbes, the former Director General had not commented on the statement and had not contributed to the statement in any way.
When contacted for a comment regarding RTÉ’s statement, a spokesperson for Ms. Forbes told Goss.ie that she wouldn’t be making any further comments.
On Tuesday afternoon, before RTÉ’s statement was released, around 200 of the broadcaster’s employees joined a protest in Donnybrook, which was organised by the National Union of Journalists.
Speaking at the protest, RTÉ’s Midlands Correspondent Sinéad Hussey admitted she feels “let down” by the situation.
She told RTÉ News: “I feel very let down as a staff member, but I feel very let down for the public.”
“The public that we ask every day: ‘Can we come into your house? Can we interview you?’,” Sinéad continued.
“And we feel very betrayed and I think it’s important to show today that we won’t accept this, we want RTÉ to reform, so that this doesn’t happen again.”
Siún Ní Dhuinn, who works with RTÉ Digital, said: “I’m protesting because I’m disappointed and I’m angry. Like the public, the staff feel the same. We’ve been let down by senior management, by the board, by the exec. So we’re here to protest that and we want better standards for the public which we’re serving every day.”
Drivetime researcher Fiona Donnellan said: “I think we need way more transparency in the organisation. Staff feel really betrayed by what’s been revealed over the last six days and we want answers.
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Meanwhile, RTÉ’s Education Correspondent Emma O’Kelly said: “So infuriating. We are constantly told ‘There’s no money, there’s no money’. People can’t get crews.”
“We’re looking for a Dublin Correspondent now for I don’t know how long, that position hasn’t been filled. There are remote controls in the newsroom that don’t work. We have zero hour contracts. I have colleagues working on zero hour contracts.”
“I have colleagues who were on bogus self-employed contracts, women who went on maternity leave and got no maternity pay, even though they were colleagues working day in, day out, rostered shifts just like me, who had no pension entitlements and no sick pay.”
“We had pay restraint. We had a second attempt to cut our pay. We were told RTÉ was in existential crisis and there was no money. And all of the time now, we discover that these secret payments were being made on top of what we all regard as totally exorbitant salary.”
