RTÉ admits paying Tubridy €345,000 more than declared

And when I say they pay, I mean they pay under some terms that has RTÉ pay!

Nope but its a very good start. Bakhurst simply had to lay down the law to everyone in RTE that there would be root and branch reform and no-one is above reform. Its going to take years to undo the mess in RTE. First big step is refuse to negotiate or even talk to agents. He's made a good start.

Given the slim pickings in terms of actual public sector broadcasting RTE actually performs, there is no reason why the licence fee should be more than 100 euro and the organisation hugely slimmed down.

As it happens I understand Ryan has had three approaches from the UK and one from North America.

I think it's unlikely he will go though, more than likely he'll be back on the radio around St Patrick's Day next year. Remember you heard it here first!

Friends of ours were invited on RT's radio show, they ran a clay pigeon shoot & she took one of her Labrador's on with her, RT asked what her name was, Purdy was the answer, that's a strange name he replied, a lot of Labrador's are called Purdy, it's the name of a famous shotgun company our friend said, blank look from RT, obviously not that famous our friend told us.

Fair play to ya Ryan. A sunny disposition.

I saw Ryan getting off a bus last week. He looked very shocked and unhappy.

I do believe Ryan will want to come back to RTE but don't doubt he has options. As you might see on another thread, several people involved on the Second Captains podcast make €110k per year. In all seriousness there's no doubt Ryan is a bigger name than those guys were when they started, talented as they were and are.

Kevn is playing with fire here a bit. There's no doubt Ryan would have a huge listenership and it'd consist of people who would have been listening to him on RTE previously. Kevin will regret it if Ryan proves to be making more money elsewhere, doesn't need to come back and keeps all the RTE listeners.

I really doubt the Ryan's listeners are anything like that loyal, there's a couple of the presenters who could actually argue that (JD maybe???) but his target audience wouldn't fall into that category.

Tubridy has earned around €10m if not more over the last 20 years from the public broadcaster for working for what a max 20 hours a week.

He just needed to come in and talk RTE paid the minimum wage reachers to do all the hard work for him.

He can take that sad face and shove it up his arse.

So Ryan has 3 approaches from UK and USA but he won't go and will then end up back on RTÉ. That would be very strange.

Even with the exit of Dermot from Dermo and Dave, I think Today FM will be happy with their line up cannot see them move Dave over for Tubrity who failed in that slot on 2FM.

Only place I see him is either taking over on Moncreiff or Lunchtime or being sandwiched between them.

20-30k??? I'd say he has a loyal fanbase of around 1,000 bourgeoisie mammies, young and old, who like reading shallow booky-wooks, and who think Tubs is an all round nice guy and an intellectual that they can relate to (he is after all a heavyweight author: check his instagram - Patrick and the President, The First Christmas Jumper, and his magnum opus JFK in Ireland). They won't pay for content. They want their names read out on live radio, so they'll stay with RTE. Having said that, it would be interesting to see Tubs do something where the massaging of figures can't hide his lack of popularity.

“Kevin is playing with fire?”

Are you for real? All the key commentators have said over the weekend that Ryan’s star will fade the longer he’s out of work and away from the public. Life and listeners/viewers will simply move on and it will be harder to come back.

If Ryan makes money on podcasting, then wonderful but it’s unlikely he will - furthermore just because someone listens to a Ryan podcast doesn’t mean they don’t have their radio tuned to RTÉ at 9am- you do know that you can listen to a podcast at any time?

Ryan has very little to offer listeners aside from his ramblings - I’d doubt there’s any more than a few thousand people who’d pay to listen to a Ryan podcast and that would drift to a few hundred after the first few weeks