Frank Galligan's It Occurs to Me: RTÉ - The Russian connection

I see where Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chief, is leaving Belarus to head the Oireachtas Mercenary Committee in their sporadic ambushes of the RTE Authority. 

Mind you, I don’t know why they really need him, as they already have Matvei Magrahin, or Mattie McGrath, as he is known in Minsk and Clonmel. Seriously though…and it is serious…spending €5,000 on 200 pairs of flip flops in 2016 seemed extraordinarily extravagant, considering so many of RTE’s corporate clients were regularly ‘footless,’ with the amount of bubbly shoved into them at ‘porties’. 

I say ‘porties’ instead of ‘parties’ in case any of my vast readership are Dee Forbes types…sorry, D4 types!

According to the Oxford Dictionary (oh yes, even we Culchies know where to look!) a flip-flopper ​is “...a person, especially a politician, who suddenly changes his or her opinion or policy.” In this instance, the politicians are turning on the broadcaster bosses with ill-disguised glee, having flipped and flopped over the years by Sean O’Rourke, David McCullagh, Claire Byrne and Dustin the Turkey. 

Some of you may recall that the Donegal Democrat published a short story by me prior to Christmas 2022 called ‘Message in a Bottle’, about a young lad from Downings who throws a bottle into the ocean and it floats from Donegal to Senegal. 

In it, he writes: “My best friend Johnny says I should send it in a plastic bottle as it will not get broken and probably wash up somewhere. But I try not to use plastic as it is polluting the oceans and killing fish and birds all over the world. I saw a television programme which showed the horrible amount of plastic which washes up on the beaches of Ghana in West Africa. I can’t remember the name of another country there which gets all the flip-flops and sandals washed in from the Canary Islands. Johnny says he was on holidays there once and left his sandals behind on the beach. He wonders if they’re in Africa now. I was very proud of the boys and men who gather up all the flip flops and recycle them and make covers for mobile phones.”

It’s a pity RTE were not aware of this polluted beach and they could have saved €5000, enough to purchase 31.25 TV licenses in Downings. 

There have been some great contributions to this debate in the past few weeks, not least David McWilliams who said: RTE 'makes a boll*x of cost control' and claimed his Ma could present the Late Late! 

RESPECTING THE LOYAL LISTENERS
Another fascinating contribution came from former RTE presenter Gareth O’Callaghan, who worked with the great Gaybo. 

“The greatest lesson I learned from Gay Byrne, who I worked closely with for three years in the 1990s, was that if you deceive your listeners who invite you into their lives every day, if you deliberately cause them to believe something that is not true, especially for personal gain, you will lose their trust and respect forever. If you rip off their belief and their faith by turning out not to be the bona fide, genuine person they always sought you out for, then you will no longer have a place in their lives. 

“Gay never discussed salary. He felt such money topics were vulgar and best kept private. His commitment was to his listeners, nothing else. He was a broadcaster to the core.  

“So when he was embezzled out of more than quarter of a million pounds by his accountant and friend Russell Murphy, the public became aware for the first time of his earnings. If anything, his financial losses made him even more popular. Gay’s income was deserved in the eyes of his loyal listeners.

He (Tubridy) has talked much about his friendship with Gay Byrne. During the years I worked with Gay, his advice was like a wake-up for your career. “Do that once and you’re history,” he would often say when I might suggest a new slant on how to cover an old topic.

Clearly, Ryan Tubridy never heard those words from the man he often credits. In August 2018, Ryan Tubridy publicly backed RTÉ’s calls for a licence fee increase. He said he and his colleagues have one thing subscription services don’t — soul. Perhaps he needs to examine the meaning of the word ‘soul’. He has lost respect and trust, shown to very few, simply because he took complete advantage of the public broadcaster who employed his services.

 He allowed greed, and a shocking lack of maturity for someone with his experience and responsibility, to replace sensibility. Should he resume his morning radio show? No, he should not. As Gay Byrne might have said, do that once and you’re history.”

THE ROT AT THE HEART IS POLITICAL
Eilis O’Hanlon in the Sindo a few weeks ago, also cut to the chase saying it was “ …inexplicable that, a few dodgy payments aside, RTÉ still appears to believe that it’s otherwise doing a great job altogether. What planet are they living on? RTÉ has consistently failed to perform its most basic functions under the Public Service Broadcasting Charter, to “reflect fairly and equally the regional, cultural and political diversity of Ireland and its peoples”.

Instead, the national broadcaster is entirely captured by special interest groups on a whole range of issues. It failed to ask hard questions during the Covid lockdown. It studiously avoids discussing legitimate grievances around immigration. 

It silences critical voices, and is routinely used by special-interest groups to push radical agendas on gender identity that have no popular support. Its presenters do not even seem to know that they’re in a bubble, cocooned by institutional smugness as they are from real-world concerns.

The righteous anger against RTÉ is not simply because of its inflated wage packages for the few. The inflated wage packages are merely a symbol of the rot at the heart of the broadcaster — and that, as always, is political. In being prepared to risk reputational ruin to slip Tubridy some extra money to buy new hardback books and put petrol in his Vespa, while treating hard-working staff at the bottom of the food chain like dirt, RTÉ has given credence to a much wider, deeper sense of unfairness.

LETTERKENNY: AN APPALLING MESS?
I’m surprised there wasn't more reaction to the then Environment Editor, Frank McDonald, in 2018 when he ended his piece about the late Derek Hill, with a jibe about Leitir Ceannain.

He wrote: “Not only is Derek Hill’s house much more charming, but its grounds also provide a lovely venue for painting classes, and there were lots of people with paintbrushes and easels working away under trees or in the Glebe Gallery’s courtyard. It’s the only house I can think of in Ireland with its multifarious contents still intact, as if Hill himself had just gone out for a walk.

The only sad note was that the post office in Church Hill had closed down the previous Friday after being run by successive generations of the Wilkins family for 180 years. Now local people must do their business in the appalling mess that is Letterkenny.”

In a review of ‘An Historical, Environmental and Cultural Atlas of County Donegal by Jim Mac Laughlin and Sean Beattie’, historian Breandán MacSuibhne wrote: “One remembers Frank McDonald of The Irish Times calling Letterkenny a “visual disaster zone” in 2002. Whatever the justification for that description, a history of the interplay of social, cultural and political factors that shaped the built environment (including the road network) of contemporary Letterkenny would be worth reading. So too would an analysis of the factors that generated a visceral reaction, from some quarters, to McDonald’s depiction of it. Any such analysis would probably make reference to a sense of being neglected by Dublin which, rather obviously, developed post-partition.” Any thoughts?