Laois-Offaly Sinn Féin TD, Brian Stanley has had his say on the Ryan Tubridy-RTÉ controversy that has made headlines in the past 24 hours.
The controversy concerns payments to Mr Tubridy by RTÉ in the amount of €345,000.
The payments, made between 2017 and the beginning of 2023, gave the false impression that Mr Tubridy had taken a larger pay cut than was the case.
Deputy Stanley, speaking on RTE’s Morning Ireland in his role as Chairman of the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee said:
“There needs to be accountability here; this is a shocking situation.
“This is not the way you do business – anyone producing accounts will know that. This is actually fraudulent accounting practices.
“When you deliberately seek to hide money; when you deliberately seek to misrepresent the accounts – be it for whatever some of money, €345,000 in this case – that is fraudulent accountancy.
“This isn’t happening in any kind of dodgy back-street operation, this isn’t Del Boy and Rodney, this is the national broadcaster.
“I am personally very, very disappointed, because we’ve had senior people from RTÉ, including Dee Forbes (RTÉ Director General) in front of our committee a number of times in the last three years and we were given firm commitments that pay across the top 10 presenters was being reduced.
“Not alone did that not happen in this case, in actual fact there was €75,000 being added on, €50,000 being added on that was deliberately concealed here.
“This is at a time when RTÉ was coming into us pleading that the finances of the organisation are in such bad shape.
It has since emerged that the aforementioned Dee Forbes has been suspended by RTÉ.
Having said on Monday that she had just gone on annual leave, the broadcaster has now revealed Ms Forbes was “suspended from her employment” on Wednesday.
“We need to know who set this up, who signed off on it, and who knew about it. Who gave this the green light? And why were we misled, not once but a number of times by the senior people in RTÉ?” Deputy Stanley said.
“Are there other cases out there at the moment? What I’m scratching my head and wondering about is why did it take so long to come out in an internal audit.
“This is going on five years, so there’s huge questions around governance and accountability.
“What we need here now is very upfront, 100% disclosure; not bits-and-pieces, not news management. This can’t come in dribs and drabs, we need people to come out that knew about this,” the Deputy said.
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