Derek Mooney exclusion from presenter pay lists ‘justifiable’, says RTÉ boss

By Cillian Sherlock, Press Association

RTÉ presenter Derek Mooney’s reclassification as a producer was not a side deal, the station’s director general has said.

On Thursday, RTÉ said it had previously excluded Mooney from its yearly published top-10 highest-paid presenter list as he has been considered a producer since 2020.

He was the seventh highest paid presenter in the organisation, last year, on €202,264, and 8th in 2024, on €197,151.

The revelation has similar features to a scandal which rocked RTÉ almost three years ago, after it was revealed that the national broadcaster had underdeclared payments to former Late Late Show host, Ryan Tubridy.

The crisis later widened out to other governance matters and the controversy around financial mismanagement at the station was seen as a driver behind a fall in TV licence receipts.

It prompted a series of heavyweight Oireachtas committees and resulted in the Government changing how the organisation is funded.

RTÉ boss Kevin Bakhurst said, on Friday, Mooney’s previous exclusion from the lists was a “justifiable” decision by the organisation’s past management, but added the current leadership has taken a different view.

He told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: “We actually took independent legal advice when the issue arose in the last few weeks about the decision that was taken in 2020 and the legal advice was it was a perfectly justifiable decision, given that Derek’s contract is as executive producer.

“But we take a different view. We think transparency is really important and most people know Derek as a presenter, and I think we’d expect him to be classified as presenter, even though I think the majority of his work is as an executive producer.”

In 2020, Mooney – who has been presenting programmes on RTE since 1994 – was reclassified as a producer in the terms of his contract, and the station said he had not been considered for inclusion in the lists since then.

However, it said on Thursday that it had reconsidered what constitutes a presenter in line with the implementation of the Government’s Expert Advisory Committee’s recommendations following the previous financial management scandal.

It has therefore included Mooney in the 2025 list – and republished its 2024 list with his inclusion to allow for a year-on-year comparison.

Mooney last appeared on top-10 earner lists in 2014. In 2019, RTÉ announced plans to reduce fees paid to top contracted on-air presenters by 15 per cent.

Asked if the reclassification was a side deal to avoid pay cuts from 2020, Bakhurst said: “No, I don’t think it was.”

Further asked if Mooney had taken a pay cut in 2020, Mr Bakhurst said: “I don’t think he got a pay cut – but he was on the staff salary and he was on an executive producer role already by that stage.”

He said people were looking for “unfair ways to portray this”, adding: “I think the rationale was he fell out of the top 10 presenters in the few years up to 2020.

“As I understand it, in 2020 he would have been back in to the top 10, and they would have had to take a decision at that stage whether he was working (the) majority of the time as a presenter or as a producer, and clearly they looked at the balance of his work – as we have done recently – and the majority of it is producing.”

He said he had seen “no evidence” that the decision around whether Monney would be included in the lists had any influence on him being impacted by the 2020 pay cuts.

RTEÉ board chair, Terence O’Rourke, said it was “possible” that Mooney could have featured in the top-10 rankings prior to 2024, but said older lists would not be re-examined as they were prepared on a previous understanding of what constituted a presenter.

O’Rourke, who has been in his role since last year, told Prime Time on Thursday night that “different judgments were made” in previous years.

Asked who made the decision in prior years that Mooney was not a presenter, he said: “The people at the time, I don’t know who they were.”

Pressed on whether revised salary lists for the last five years would be published, Mr Bakhurst said: “We can’t every time we change something, go back and rewrite history.”

The 2025 figures also revealed that RTÉ continued to pay presenters Ray D’Arcy and Claire Byrne even after they left the organisation in October 2025.

For the remainder of the year, D’Arcy received €50,000 and Byrne received €47,000.

O’Rourke said he was “happy” it was the “right decision”, adding: “They weren’t doing nothing – they were available.

“If anything happened, they would still have been under contract to present.”

He said it was “wise” for the organisation to continue to pay them as there could have been legal issues with not doing so.

Bakhurst agreed, on Friday, that the €97,000 in payments was “totally the right decision”.

He said RTÉ wanted to take Byrne off air after she said she was leaving so it could launch its new Radio One schedule, while he characterised the timeline around D’Arcy as “effectively his notice period”.

He said they had employment rights and a legal fight would have cost a “shedload more”.