At any given point in the news cycle, a couple of dominant subjects appear unavoidable for a couple of weeks. Some of this is down to hard news, but much of it is pre-planned: a big movie release; a sporting event; a political landmark.
This is the stuff that doesn’t lead the bulletins but populates the blurbs at the top of front pages, the covers of supplements and the softer end of the premium broadcast interview slots.
Over the past two weeks, there have been two such stories. One is the new film of Wuthering Heights. The other is the rather less windswept Ryan Tubridy. The former RTÉ star has featured on the cover of the RTÉ Guide, been interviewed by a number of national newspapers and appeared on Miriam O’Callaghan’s Sunday morning radio show as well as Ireland AM – his first Irish TV outing since the payments scandal broke in 2023. The ostensible reason was to promote his appearance on The Assembly, Virgin Media TV’s likable but relatively minor show in which well-known figures are quizzed by an audience of neurodivergent interlocutors.
[ Ryan Tubridy: ‘I’m a different person now to who I was a couple of years ago. I’ve evolved’Opens in new window ]
Disappointingly, none of these encounters has featured any startling revelations. But it’s clear that Tubridy continues to believe he was the scapegoat for failings that mostly lay elsewhere.
Coincidentally or not, RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst has been doing the rounds too. The result has been a greater focus on how his restructuring plan for RTÉ is going, and what the national broadcaster will look like when it emerges from the other end. Bakhurst makes an unlikely Macbeth, but there’s definitely a touch of Banquo’s ghost about Tubridy’s re-emergence – a reminder of the scandal that triggered the upheaval now reshaping the organisation.
An article last weekend by Laura Slattery and Colm Keena in The Irish Times contained some interesting snippets. One thread concerned the future of the Montrose campus in Donnybrook, where RTÉ has been located for more than 60 years. When the crisis broke in 2023, there was talk of relocating and selling the site entirely. Under Bakhurst’s predecessor, Dee Forbes, nearly nine acres were sold to Cairn Homes for €107.5 million. But Bakhurst has indicated that further sales would be complicated by listed buildings on the remaining site, including the original television, radio, administration and scene dock buildings from the 1960s and 1970s. These represent one of the most significant collections of Miesian modernist architecture in the State.
The situation is further complicated by an EU directive requiring public bodies to ensure their buildings meet environmental standards by 2030. RTÉ says it cannot meet the estimated cost of more than €350 million for compliance. The plan is to consolidate operations into the newer Stage 7 building and expand in Cork, while the legacy campus … well, nobody seems sure what will happen to it.
It looks, therefore, as if a large part of the Montrose complex will be left semi-vacant. That’s already the case with Ronnie Tallon’s celebrated radio building, where the ghosts of Gay Byrne, Marian Finucane and Gerry Ryan wander the corridors, largely undisturbed by living souls. The question of what to do with the listed buildings appears unresolved, the prospect of them becoming Ireland’s most famous derelict structures hanging in the air. That will hardly add to the sense of renewal or fresh thinking around the place.
Nor will it be helped by the prospect of continuing staff cuts over the next three years. RTÉ employed 1,853 people at the start of 2025; Bakhurst’s target is around 1,400 by 2030. Sixty-seven took a voluntary exit scheme last year and 30 retirements went unreplaced. A second voluntary redundancy programme is being sought. These processes inevitably sap morale. Staggering the reductions over four years may be operationally necessary, with each stage requiring Government approval, but it leaves a pall of long-term uncertainty over the organisation.
[ The shrinking of RTÉ: ‘It feels like an increasingly neutered organisation’Opens in new window ]
Bakhurst did not seem to demur when it was put to him that at the end of the process, RTÉ will have outsourced pretty much everything except news and current affairs, sport and radio. That prospect has sparked fears that the “zombification” which has afflicted many media companies in recent years is the real future of RTÉ. But what some see as hollowing out, others describe as necessary reform. One source told Slattery and Keena that the shift to independent production was required in part because outmoded and expensive work practices still persisted in some in-house units.
Either way, you don’t have to be an expert in group psychology to recognise that none of this helps staff morale. A vote on confidence in the senior leadership team’s strategy and its ability to deliver “a fit-for-purpose public service broadcaster for Ireland’s future” is under way through Siptu, which represents more than 600 employees. The director general acknowledges this but does not appear unduly perturbed.
It would be easy to dismiss the Siptu motion as predictable resistance to necessary change. But it contains a fundamental question that long predates the current crisis. Given the supposed rationale for its existence, RTÉ has always been a strangely unwelcoming place for innovation. When creativity and talent have emerged, it often seemed to be in spite of rather than because of management. The shift to independent commissioning may be inevitable, but it tilts the balance further in the bureaucracy’s favour. As Tubridy pointed out in his interview with O’Callaghan, seven of the 10 highest-paid people at RTÉ are now managers.
This is an institution that, by its own admission, has failed under successive generations of administrators to cope with the changing media landscape. The question now is whether the current crop can do better, or whether it will simply do progressively less and less, in its haunted house in Donnybrook.
