Taoiseach says new RTÉ payment controversy ‘difficult to comprehend’

By Cillian Sherlock and Claudia Savage, Press Association

A new controversy around payments to an RTÉ presenter is “difficult to comprehend”, the Taoiseach has said.

RTÉ bosses have been called for a meeting with the Minister for Communications after it revealed that Derek Mooney has been at least its ninth highest-paid presenter since 2020 – but had not featured in annual lists as he was classified as a producer.

Minister Patrick O’Donovan also said he wanted to “flesh out” more information on how RTÉ paid Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy almost €100,000 after they left Radio One.

In the wake of the Mooney announcement, the minister called for an audit of payments to presenters at the national broadcaster.

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

The scandal 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.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said “the right decision was taken” by RTÉ in clarifying pay of its presenters and added that it was important that confidence in the national broadcaster was retained.

Speaking to reporters at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis, he also defended the licence fee and proposals to increase the pay of station chief Kevin Bakhurst.

He added: “We don’t want to be micromanaging RTÉ either, or indeed micromanaging commercial semi-states, so obviously the formal decision has to come to government, but again, there’s a marketplace out there as well and one has to be sensible in how you go about things as well.”

Describing the Mooney revelations as a “side issue”, O’Donovan said: “The greater issue here is payments in their entirety across the organisation in the period from 2020 onwards and which should have been subjected to an audit.”

He added: “I also don’t want to know monies without total packages, I think we’ve moved on way too far from that.”

O’Donovan said he has called a meeting in his department on Tuesday involving him, his officials and representatives of RTÉ – including the chair and director-general.

RTÉ is also due to appear before the Oireachtas Media Committee on Wednesday.

Earlier on Friday, the broadcaster’s director-general said the reclassification of Mooney as a producer in 2020 was not a side deal.

Bakhurst said Mooney’s previous exclusion from the lists was a “justifiable” decision by the organisation’s past management given his contract is as an executive producer, but added the current leadership has taken a different view because most people know him as a presenter.

The reclassification came in line with the implementation of the Government’s Expert Advisory Committee’s recommendations following the previous financial management scandal.

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.”

He added: “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.”

Public Accounts Committee member Seamus McGrath told Newstalk the revelations were “damaging” to public trust in RTÉ.

The 2025 figures also revealed that RTÉ continued to pay presenters D’Arcy and 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.

Byrne has said she was “happy to stay on and work” at the organisation until the end of her contract.

Speaking on her Newstalk programme on Friday, Byrne said: “I resigned from RTÉ in the summer, my contract though, ran until the end of the year, December 2025.

“And I made it clear, I was happy to stay on and work there until the end of my contract.

“But RTÉ came to me and told me that 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.”

Bakhurst said 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”.

On his podcast, D’Arcy said Bakhurst had done a “good enough job” explaining the situation, but criticised RTÉ for what he said was a lack of transparency around the director-general’s own remuneration.

Elsewhere in the figures, RTÉ explained that Patrick Kielty was paid an additional €23,980 across 2024 and 2025 as he presented additional programmes beyond his standard contract.

Kielty, who recently came to the end of a contract to host the Late Late Show, had said his pay was €250,000.

However, he was paid €266,323 in 2025 and €257,657 in 2024.

Asked to explain the discrepancy, the national broadcaster said: “RTÉ required Mr Kielty to present some additional programmes beyond his standard contract in these years, and he was paid the agreed fees for this work as included in the published figures.”