RTÉ to appear before Media Committee
Ellen O'Donoghue
RTÉ are due to appear before the Media Committee at 12.30pm.
It comes after recent pay revelations uncovering that Derek Mooney was not included in the top-10 highest-paid presenters list, even though he was paid enough to feature every year between 2020 and 2025.
Mooney, however, was reclassified as a producer in his contract, and the broadcaster said he had not been considered for inclusion in the list since then.
The 2025 figures also revealed that RTÉ continued to pay Ray D'Arcy and Claire Byrne after they left the broadcaster in October 2025.
For the remainder of the year, D'Arcy received €50,000, and Byrne received €47,000.
Late Late Show presenter Patrick Kielty, who recently came to the end of his contract, was also paid an additional €23,980 across 2024 and 2025 as he presented additional programmes beyond his standard contract.
RTÉ bosses met with Communications Minister Patrick O'Donovan on Tuesday evening amid the fresh scrutiny of its financial management.
Station director-general Kevin Bakhurst, deputy director-general Adrian Lynch, and board chairman Terence O’Rourke attended the meeting with O’Donovan and his officials in Dublin.
Bakhurst and Lynch are the RTÉ reps to attend the meeting on Wednesday.
Consultant Sam Whipple, who worked as a “change co-ordinator” at the BBC, has been tasked with examining how RTÉ is structured and resourced and to identify areas to “improve workflows” and “delivery” across TV, radio, online and social media.
His review started at the end of April and is expected to last 40 days. It was not required to be publicly tendered and is therefore understood to cost less than €50,000.
On Tuesday, however, Bakhurst refused to provide a specific figure on what Whipple was being paid and declined to put a figure on how much in savings he was expected to identify.
The Committee session, which begins at 12.30pm, is expected to last two hours, with station bosses likely to be grilled on much of the above and whether they learned their lessons from previous governance failures and transparency issues.
