Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

I love the ‘woe is me’ angle he keeps bringing up. ‘No one is answering the door to me. Wah!’. No one is crying for you Ryan.
Wouldn’t even bother reading that article behind the paywall. Same old guff. RTÉ is where the money and prestige is and he knows it. Suppose NK has to keep getting these articles in the Indo to keep justifying his fee.
As for Ryan’s podcast, I know a local radio guy with his own podcast on the side too and he gets 25,000 downloads a week. Thats the field Ryan is playing in now!

Point of correction your honour in the chronology there…

The Toyman “resigned” from hosting TLLS 9 days after the payments were discovered internally in an internal audit. It would be a number of months before the story broke publicly so to speak. But it’s just a coincidence !

My final thought for this evening concerns the following:

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given?

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.

To be fair to him, he manages that with great regularity and consistency judging by the standard of his command of the written word in his delicious London Diary column.

All the time, went to an interview in Dublin she was interviewed by Mark Little, really bad interview where she said nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU9gHFauMY4

So we now have the Book published, though 2 chapters so far.

Well Shane Ross is ultimately blaming the Dual funding set out at the beginning, Advertising and Public Funding.

It's so far a history of Tubs and of RTÉ, all of which I either knew or had assumed.

His interview with Lelia Doolan was disappointing, but there is an idea that the problem is commercial more than anything else. He sits in the past, perhaps the formation of the RTÉ boards in the 70, 80 and 90s might tell us more, but will he even get to that.

No nothing really new in the book so far.

Really just rehashing a lot stuff I already knew. The best compliment so far that I can give it is that if you are unaware of the foundation of RTÉ it might interest you, the chapter on Gay Byrne the only insight is his loyalty to Fianna Fail, but that might not be news to someone else and isn't all that interest for anyone who didn't know, rest is already known information about TLLS and Gay Bryne as presenter/host, I suppose when a Fine Gael man robs your life saving your probably going to be FF!

Tubs chapter is about his rise and his connections and his connections to FF.

So far I feel that if anyone has a connection to FF Ross would write a book about them!

There is one part in fairness but very short where he talks to a couple who are now in their 90s, the husband was there on night of the opening as a vision mixer. I think his wife arrive later in the 60s, but that would have been a far more interesting point of view, perhaps he will go back to them.

I’m in sunnier parts of the world for the last week and next so it will be some time yet before I can get my hands on a copy, but I suspect (as you say yourself) there’s precious little if any new material in this for anyone with an interest in broadcasting and media.

I’d also agree on your point re. had it been solely funded from the public purse - it’s not like other semi-states have been immune to corruption and dodgy practices.

Speaking of Dee Forbes, I have a friend who is originally from Cork but works in Dublin who says he’s almost sure he passed her in the passenger seat of a car in Schull last weekend. A rare sighting indeed if true.

Yeah, he has a good go at Harris.

Rory Coveney - while he was just following the strategy, he was their director of strategy and he wasn't all that forthcoming to the board about its lack of success, he may not have been involved in Tubridy affair, but he was central to numerous mistakes in relation to Toy Show the Musical. He agreed with the convention centre a deal where RTÉ would incur fees should the show not take place. He would have worked with both Moya and D4bres in relation to this.

Geraldine O'Leary - while yes you can argue as she was the Commercial Director she would have to "wine and dine", it was she who used the barter accounts and knew about them. In fairness to her she did take questions and she did attend. But She absolutely had responsibility to bring any extravagant commercial revenue raising marketing (such as sending people to events such as the Rugby WC in Japan), she did not do this, she was extravagant, did she really bring in more money that any of her predecessors, she was over seeing the biggest seller of advertising in the country, how could she not raise revenue, did she alone get 20 or 30% extra that the content would of received? How could she fail?

Do we honestly think that the sale of ads during the WC will be down to the commercial team at RTÉ, or RTÉ's partnership with the EBU for rights?

Richard Collins - I agree he was scapegoated, I hope he left because he was unwilling to stay and would have sued RTÉ for constructive dismissal, and in fairness I think he'd be right, he was badly treated, after it was he how discover most of what was going on and reported on it. (I am surprised with a name like Collins his family political allegiance wasn't brought up in this book).

As for the board he is right, the board should have resigned. Yes some of them left early (JP McManus, his excuse was that he was too busy to stay on board, he was due to leave just 9 months later), some of them didn't look for a second term Ian Kehoe (who was the star pupil as deputy chair, and I read in one article a potential replacement for D4bres, at least before the scandal).

The board should have resigned and the executive team should have either resigned or been sacked if they refused to resign, Backhurst’s “new” executive team should not have had any holdovers and should have been an entirely new team. That it wasn’t speaks volumes. How some of them kept their jobs is something I feel could only have occurred in an organisation as “bonkers” as RTÉ.

O’Leary always had a very high opinion of herself, but it would be harder to not make money in that role than to succeed. She acted like she alone and only she could have driven revenue in that role, which is laughable. The junkets and freebies were absolutely outrageous, and the +1 policy only added to it. And that’s before you consider it’s at least partly public money.

Collins appeared (from his public performances at least) shall we say a little out of his depth in such a role. I’m not sure grounds for a constructive dismissal claim would have been met but while he does deserve some credit for his part in raising the issue (once it had been discovered by a 3rd party) the fact it happened under his nose and had been going on for a number of years is damning.

Coveney was another who appeared out of his depth in the Oireachtas hearings and in interviews on the TSTM fiasco. I’m imagine his surname didn’t hurt him in applying for the job, but it didn’t save him. The Convention Centre deal was another “bonkers” move, again even more so when one considers its public money.

Unlikely as she lives in Cork.