Government doing everything to distance itself from job losses at RTÉ

The Government is doing such a consistent job of distancing itself from the prospect of redundancies at RTÉ that it is still not completely clear if there will be any.

Director general Kevin Bakhurst has said it will become “a smaller organisation” in future and also ruled out compulsory redundancies, two statements that would, under normal business logic, point to an imminent voluntary exit scheme.

But normal business logic does not apply here. This is politics and politicians have been known to excel at the strung-out art of the stalemate.

Bakhurst made plain in September, and again last week, that RTÉ doesn’t have the money to pay for such a scheme and that any redundancies at RTÉ would have to be paid for out of the public funding injection that is eventually approved by the Government.

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This €40 million in emergency funding, a replacement for lost licence fee income, is contingent on Minister for Media Catherine Martin being “happy”, as she put it, with Bakhurst’s strategic plan for RTÉ.

Although a separate €16 million funding boost is “set in stone”, RTÉ will have to wait for the €40 million until the Minister and her coalition colleague Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe “sit down and thoroughly investigate” Bakhurst’s plan, which they expect to receive in late October or early November.

[ Inside RTÉ: rats, redundancies and shattered morale ]

[ RTÉ financial crisis: Kevin Bakhurst says broadcaster will be insolvent without bailout of tens of millions ]

As far as the detail goes, Martin has stressed that it is “for RTÉ to bring those decisions to us”, rather than for the Government to “make decisions on operational matters”, while Donohoe has suggested it would be “disrespectful” of him “to start speculating publicly about what I want to see”.

Members of the Oireachtas media committee – and journalists, too – have tried valiantly to get the Minister for Media to say more. To the committee, Martin said any voluntary redundancy scheme proposed by Bakhurst would have to be “assessed” and that semi-State advisers NewEra would be the ones doing the assessing.

She also said it would not be for her to “interfere” were Bakhurst to reduce funding for RTÉ's local and European election and party conference coverage as part of a package of cuts.

But with that principle of editorial independence firmly cited, she went on to note that “some of the cost efficiencies” the director general had theoretically outlined in September would be “quite minimal in the grander scheme of where savings need to be made”.

His plan would have to be “on a much grander scale”, she said, later outlining to reporters that RTÉ would need to slash its €350 million cost base by €21 million.

Notwithstanding all this careful talk, the problem of perception hasn’t just vanished into history like Aertel.

If the Government signs off on a plan that includes a voluntary redundancy scheme, it risks coming across like it thinks it is a justifiable consequence of a €345,000 underdeclaration of pay to presenter Ryan Tubridy – plus a mishmash of other corporate governance issues – to give the okay to job losses. That could look a little unusual. And unfair.

“Voluntary” can have many shades. If RTÉ, its hand forced by the Government, was to announce a shutdown or a hollowing out of certain services or a decentralisation of others, a voluntary exit package would quickly start to seem like a targeted one. Memories are fresh within RTÉ of a 2019 proposal by Bakhurst’s predecessor Dee Forbes to shut down Lyric FM’s Limerick base to save money. The move prompted much alarm among staff, as well as a political backlash, before it was abandoned.

[ Interim funding for RTÉ seems destined to pay for redundancies ]

[ RTÉ needs State money to fund voluntary job cuts, director general tells staff ]

Likewise, if RTÉ was to somehow find the human resources bandwidth to simplify its labyrinthine system of staff allowances and entitlements – which it has long said it wants to do – that could leave a bad taste among those for whom the outcome is unfavourable.

And if RTÉ's reform plans were to feature a hiving-off of some in-house programme-making into a new entity – “RTÉ Studios”, perhaps, to echo the BBC’s commercial subsidiary BBC Studios – then trade union alarm bells would instantly start ringing.

The impact of voluntary redundancies is also not voluntary for those who stay.

Rather than pushing people out its creaky exit gate, however, RTÉ has in recent years, if anything, taken the opposite approach.

The broadcaster’s director of human resources Eimear Cusack, told the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee on Thursday that there were 184 applications to its 2021 voluntary exit scheme, yet only 25 employees were “released”. This was for a scheme where the target initially made public was for 60-70 people to leave.

Even allowing for the fact that some applicants may have decided not to accept an offer, the difference between the two numbers indicates that RTÉ was not exactly racing to suppress many of the roles, this being a condition of the scheme.

Indeed, various attempts to whittle down RTÉ's headcount in the past have either failed or succeeded only temporarily. Recruitment freezes have melted. Waves of voluntary departures have been followed by the welcoming of new hires with the skills to help it evolve along with the marketplace it operates in.

In 2022, the total workforce fell by just three people to 1,868, despite the transfer of the National Symphony Orchestra to the National Concert Hall. The staff tally then rose again in January 2023 after 52 Fair City actors were converted from contractor status to employees following an internal review and some trips to the Workplace Relations Commission.

For supporters of public media and/or labour laws, it is hard to argue that any of this is wrong. But what is the “right” number for RTÉ to employ?

The political highlighting of RTÉ “inefficiencies” rams home the idea that Ministers believe the optimum total is lower than the current figure. Whether that’s because they think the organisation is bloated, they reckon a headcount shrinking could be engineered in a way that boosts the independent production sector, they are hoping licence fee sales might recover, they want to be prudent or they just fancy gutting RTÉ, it’s tough to say.

But the campus rallies held by the RTÉ Trade Union Group in the aftermath of the hidden payments scandal separated – in many people’s minds – the plight of “ordinary workers” at RTÉ from the excessively paid club at the top. When the time for approval or rejection comes, any plan containing voluntary redundancies should have “proceed with caution” stamped all over it.