RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

All Ryan has to do is give back the 150k he was paid by RTE for 6 gigs that's didn't happen and probably will never happen and he will be free to return to RTE. Is that where we are at,do you think?

And the millions from the barter account they all thought was their personal slush fund

I agree with that. RTE is a broken and rotitng from the insides and needs systematic change .I feel as though,as far as Tubridy and bahurst are concerned, this 150k is the crux of the matter. That is what their "Frank and open discussion was about"

I think Tubridy will be back once he agrees to hand back that money. I think there will be a big PR machine in motion to get him back

If the PR machine involves NKM puff pieces, RTE have not learnt their lesson and can get to fook.

Have to disagree with you about Marty, he has stolen a living on the back of the gaa and with Rte as well, another talentless clown with the hand in the cookie jar, commentary on the Ireland with him is the same old waffle with a long gone sell by date. Hopefully revenue catch up with him shortly.

With all these talk of podcasts - listened to Joe Brolly / Dion Fanning one - thought it was interesting -

But another that was thought provoking was the David McWilliams podcast (again he's not everybody's cup of tea) but he was making the case that if you compare salaries in our national broadcaster RTE 300K to 500K to broadcaster salaries in Denmark (which has the same population as us) their national broadcaster pays it's presenters 90K to 120K.

I immediately though of the debate on the 100K salary - if the Danish national broadcaster is running their organisation and the top earner there is on 120K how the FUP did we end up with Ryan 'Toyman' Tubridy on 500K?

Oh, and another point from the Brolly-cast that I agreed with, he was talking about Gay Byrne and how fearless he was in confronting the accepted pieties of the time and never shied away from controversy even though he knew he might lose his job . . . the current generation of broadcasters in comparison will never challenge the orthodoxy - their inflated salaries buys their silence

I’d forgotten that fluff from last year. He certainly believes his own PR. Laughable really

I can see a solicitor standing up in court and saying '' My client was indeed found coming out the window of the victim's house with the property in his possession but he has agreed to give it back and he will attend mass next Sunday''.

He's still a burglar.

Yea McSavage was born into the golden circle but he turned around and bit them all and burnt all his bridges.

He was defending Tubridy on his podcast though and said he deserved his salary. He said that all the RTE reporters and staff protesting outside RTE were just jealous because they could never get that sort of money.

You can't even search for the Savage eye on the player as its been taken off that aswell. Some of the sketches have a cult following now due to tik tok etc among the young that never say the series when it was aired on RTE

Interesting about the Danish model. I know that culturally Denmark is very much of that Scandinavian view that there is a solid social contract. ie "you do the work, pay a lot of tax, and we promise that those taxes will be put to good use in the public good and we won't take the piss with our salaries" - That would very much NOT be the Irish view!

As well as the obvious historical issues around colonization leading to a culture of cute hoorism, I wonder how much of this attitude also comes down to Ireland being an english speaking country. Had we been irish speaking, I can see an alternate reality where RTE is a trimmed down organisation, on a much smaller budget and all the "talent" are on fractions of the current figures. Our fluency with the saxon tongue certainly allows us to believe, as a great stateswoman once said "that we are much closer to Boston than Berlin" with all the extravagance that that entails.

This all sounds like a David McWilliams podcast episode if ever I heard one! RE Brolly's take on Gay Byrne and his love of taking a lump hammer to traditional Ireland's pieties, I though that was very true and something that has always perplexed me about Tubridy. He is a man who would have been far more comfortable fronting the LLS in the mid 1960's. I'm sure had any missives come in from the Archbishop, he would happily change or drop items to placate His Eminence. By some weird quirk, the Ireland of the 2010's having undergone all the societal change imaginable, somehow had the most conservative invertebrate working on the flagship programme of the national broadcaster.