Senator and former RTÉ presenter Evanne Ní Chuilinn has accused RTÉ chief Kevin Bakhurst of ‘gaslighting’ the public by claiming the station is being punished for its ‘transparency’.

The director general’s comments in the wake of the latest payments scandal to engulf the national broadcaster have also infuriated the Cabinet, with one senior minister bluntly telling Mr Bakhurst: ‘It’s your job to be transparent.’

After a two-hour meeting with Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan this week, Mr Bakhurst said RTÉ has ‘paid the price for transparency’ amid the backlash over the latest payments controversy involving presenter and producer Derek Mooney. 

He also repeatedly argued he has pushed a renewed transparency agenda at RTÉ when he appeared before the Oireachtas Media Committee this week.

However, writing in today’s Irish Mail on Sunday, Senator Ní Chuilinn accused Mr Bakhurst of ‘gaslighting the public into thinking RTÉ has been punished for its transparency’.

The former RTÉ sports journalist said the controversial reclassification of Derek Mooney’s pay – which meant he was incorrectly excluded from RTÉ’s list of top-earning presenters – shows there is a ‘two-tier [pay] system at play’ in Montrose.

She said: ‘What has damaged the trust in this RTÉ leadership team… is that reclassification has consistently been denied to ordinary workers at the organisation for decades.’

Ms Ní Chuilinn, who told the Dáil committee this week she was not paid as a presenter at RTÉ despite doing a presenter’s job for a decade, adds: ‘If you’re doing a job you’re not contracted or paid to do, imagine how the news of repeated reclassifications for a top earner came to those workers last week.

‘There’s a two-tier system at play and gaslighting the public into thinking RTÉ has been punished for its transparency is a worrying exhibition of defiance.’ These comments were echoed by senior ministers this weekend.

One Cabinet source told the MoS: ‘It appears that Kevin Bakhurst believes he is being punished for being transparent, and that removes the requirement for him to be transparent.

‘Well, firstly, our job isn’t to incentivise you to be transparent, Kevin. It’s your job to be transparent, right?

‘So, like, you’re not doing us a favour by being transparent, and we don’t give you a little bonus or say, “well done, thanks for being transparent”. It’s your job to be transparent.

‘You’re a public service broadcaster, heavily funded by the people of Ireland. It’s your job and your obligation to be transparent.’

Mr Bakhurst told the committee this week that the decision to reclassify Mr Mooney’s pay was made by his predecessor, Dee Forbes, in 2020.

However, it also emerged this week that presenter and comedian Oliver Callan – who was hired under Mr Bakhurst’s watch to replace Ryan Tubridy following the former Late Late Show host’s exit from RTÉ in the wake of the original secret payments scandal – is paid separately for his Callan’s Kicks show, on top of the €150,000 he earns for his daily radio programme.

RTÉ conceded that, when combined, Callan’s overall pay would put him into the top 10 list of its highest-paid presenters.

Mr Bakhurst has also come under pressure after the partner of the late RTÉ presenter Seán Rocks this week said her family has been left ‘very disadvantaged financially’ due to his pay structure.

Mr Rocks, who presented the Arena arts and culture programme on RTÉ Radio 1 for 16 years, died last year after a short illness at the age of 64.

His partner, Catherine Bailey, said his pension was ‘no reflection at all’ on the 25 years that Mr Rocks – who was made a permanent employee in 2019 – had worked at the broadcaster.

Separately, Mr Bakhurst is also coming under pressure internally after RTÉ admitted that most of the €100,000 of taxpayers’ money it has spent fighting a data request from Ryan Tubridy has gone on legal fees.

The revelation has sparked further anger among RTÉ employees who believe the broadcaster should hand over any data that is requested without ‘wasting’ additional money.

Senior Government leaders are also unhappy that, despite Mr Bakhurst’s insistence he is overseeing greater ‘transparency’, the minister first learned about the Derek Mooney pay debacle when he was contacted by an RTÉ journalist, not Montrose management.

A Cabinet source said: ‘In reference to the actual disclosure of the data about Mooney, if you wanted to pretend Bakhurst’s complaints had a shred of validity, it would have been based on the fact that Kevin Bakhurst and [RTÉ chair] Terence O’Rourke decided to publish this data [about Mooney].

‘But that is not how it happened. A query came into the minister [O’Donovan]. Where do you think the media query came from? It came from RTÉ.

'A RTÉ journalist put in a media query… and only then did RTÉ [management] tell the minister.’

Ministers also poured scorn on the RTÉ top 10 list of its highest-paid presenters in light of the latest revelations.

One Cabinet member told the MoS: ‘The aim of this list should be, who in RTÉ is getting the most money… I presume that’s the idea of the f***ing list.

‘The top 10 list, as [Labour TD and Media Committee chair] Alan Kelly said, tells us “absolutely sweet f all”, because it only has your “basic” salary, right? 

'That’s now a new phenomenon. And not having a go at Oliver Callan here – I’m just using this as a pure example, because it’s not his fault – but if you’re getting a salary plus you’re getting a payment to your company, surely in any logical world, my child will tell you that A added to B equals the total amount you get.’

Cabinet sources pointed out that a minister’s pay includes the salary they earn as a TD, with a ministerial top-up.

One minister said: ‘We don’t publish our salaries as separate, because people would laugh at us… correctly.’

Another source noted there was a view in some sections of the Cabinet that Mr Bakhurst ‘was doing an okay job until recently’.

They added: ‘But this has been a very bad week. The Media Minister and others in the department may have thought Bakhurst was actually doing a reasonably good job, but I think the concern this week would have been tonal.

‘But the idea that you need an incentive to be transparent, well, that’s unacceptable. Bakhurst did himself an awful lot of damage with those remarks and how he has handled this latest crisis.’

Asked for a response to the criticism of Mr Bakhurst, the RTÉ press office replied by sending extracts of Mr Bakhurst’s opening statement to the Dáil committee this week.

In response to Ms Ní Chuilinn’s comments, a spokesman also sent extracts of the same statement in which the director general said he remains ‘fiercely committed to the transparent reform of legacy matters in the interests of both RTÉ and its staff, and in the interest of best-practice reporting too’.

It added: ‘Beyond that, I and the leadership team will continue to interrogate what we feel needs interrogation. We will correct what deserves correction.’

RTÉ confirmed that the dispute with Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly over the former Late Late Show’s hosts data request remains ‘outstanding’.

A spokesman said: ‘The costs – which have been in the public domain for some time – relate for the most part to legal costs, as RTÉ did not have the resources to review thousands of documents relating to this data access request.’

The broadcaster confirmed there have been few additional costs incurred processing the disputed documents since a figure of €100,000 was published a year ago.

The spokesman added: ‘The issue that remains outstanding is that they [Noel Kelly and Ryan Tubridy] believe they are entitled to more material and RTÉ disagrees.’