RTE’s Bakhurst pulled TV licence fee ads ‘as they would have been inappropriate’

RTE director general Kevin Bakhurst has said he pulled ads for the TV licence from other broadcasting platforms as he thought it would be “inappropriate” to ask people to pay the fee in the middle of the RTE scandal.

Mr Bakhurst said management were trying to do “everything we could” to re-establish trust with the Irish public.

Members of the RTE board are appearing before the Oireachtas Media Committee to answer questions about the transparency of RTE’s expenditure as well as governance issues.

Mr Bakhurst said RTE decided to pull advertising of the TV licence on channels outside its own platforms last July, amid the scandal that had engulfed the public broadcaster.

In June last year it emerged that secret payments had been made to former RTE presenter Ryan Tubridy.

The extra payments had not been declared when RTE published the earnings of its top 10 most highly paid presenters for 2020 and 2021.

Mr Bakhurst said he made the decision to pull paid advertisements for “a number of reasons”.

“The main reason was because I thought that given what was emerging about RTE at that stage, and the constant scandal that was unfolding, I thought it would be inappropriate for us to be paying for adverts demanding people to pay the licence fee,” he added.

Fine Gael TD Brendan Griffin was highly critical of this decision, saying it was a deliberate attempt by the board to get rid of the licence fee and collapse revenues.

“Was this strategic? Is this part of hoping that the licence fee will ultimately fail and completely collapse and you’ll get what you were looking for?” the TD said.

Mr Bakhurst said: “Categorially not. It was done on two bases. One is we were in a position where we were really worried about cashflow. So we were looking at stopping discretionary spending.

“We did this in conjunction talking to the department (of Media) and to An Post. We didn’t think it was appropriate to be spending licence-payers’ money chasing them to pay licence fees when the scandal was unfolding. It was tone deaf at the time.

“I was trying to be respectful to the audience at that stage.”

He said the decision was agreed at board level.

Mr Bakhurst added: “We were doing everything we could to re-establish trust for the audience and I thought we needed to take some physical measures to re-establish trust before we should go out and demand people pay.”