The late, great, Colm Murray would surely have said of the State broadcaster’s latest catastrophe: ‘Kevin Bakhurst has no friends in the market’. 

For readers who are not avid horse racing followers – or are part of the growing number who aren’t RTÉ viewers – Colm Murray was a much loved RTÉ sports presenter who was best known as the voice of Irish racing. He was synonymous with the Galway Races, for example.

Besides being one of the most likeable men in Irish journalism, he did a wonderful line in understatement. 

Colm was too adroit to tell viewers that a horse was a complete donkey and that nobody was placing their money on it in the betting market. 

He would gently say the horse ‘had no friends in the market.’

Any residual confidence there was in the reformer, Bakhurst, among the viewing and listening public, the regular RTÉ workers, producers, presenters – even the newly disclosed category of producer/presenters – finally disappeared last week. 

Yet, most dangerously for the former BBC man, all friends in the Government market have deserted him too.

Last Monday night, senior politicians and civil servants briefed me for the following day’s newspaper about what was about to emerge in the bottomless RTÉ controversy.

During these conversations, what struck me most was not the latest round of disclosures about financial dysfunction – at this stage I’m inured to those. 

No, it was the vitriol aimed at RTÉ. It was personal with Bakhurst. 

One senior figure referred to him scathingly as ‘the new sheriff in town’ who has promised to clean up RTÉ’s Wild West.

That same evening, a Cabinet minister told me they were ‘getting sick of the new sheriff in town act’ from Bakhurst. 

When the same phrasing is used, it usually indicates that people have been talking.

‘What Bakhurst has done here,’ said the minister, ‘is that he has come in promising a cleaning up of RTÉ, if you want to call it that. 

Bakhurst came in, and we were told: “there’s a new sheriff in town”. Well, now it’s worse. It’s actually worse and that’s – well, that’s betrayal, isn’t it?’

It's one thing being the head of a State-funded organisation when it’s involved in financial mismanagement.

But it’s a whole other thing coming in, as Bakhurst did in July 2023, at the epicentre of the greatest crisis in RTÉ’s history, promising the Government hiring him that he was going to clean it all up, and then finding himself back three years later at the same squalid point.

I’ve written here, at each eruption of an RTÉ financial scandal, that dispassionate coverage is difficult. 

At the heart of the matter, we are discussing national celebrities placed into our collective consciousness by influential mediums of television and radio.

And then politics is thrown in on top of it all, with threats from Cabinet briefed to people like me, and jokes about Marty Morrissey’s dancing at Oireachtas Committees.

But let’s state this simply. The 2023 RTÉ scandal that changed the organisation forever happened because RTÉ understated Ryan Tubridy’s pay between 2017 and 2019.

Last week’s scandal broke because it was confirmed by RTÉ that it had understated Derek Mooney’s pay since 2020.

These initial briefings came, as I said, on Monday night. 

Then Bakhurst, who had been in to see Cabinet bruiser Patrick O’Donovan, came out with some of the most extraordinarily deluded comments ever heard from a public servant in this State.

Taking the job in July 2023, Bakhurst told RTÉ staff he would be ‘open and transparent’. 

Speaking to reporters after the O’Donovan meeting, Bakhurst said: ‘We have paid a price for that transparency, which is the controversy in the last few days, and that’s disappointing for me, because I do want to drive transparency.

‘I’ve said that all along, and if we pay that kind of price when we discover something we want to put right and put it in the public domain, it’s not an incentive to be more transparent.’

The director general of RTÉ said – having taken the job at the height of a pay controversy, promising to be transparent – that RTÉ, as an organisation needs, to be incentivised to be transparent.

Maybe Bakhurst seeks a ‘death by cop’ sacking by an exasperated Government, but when addressing an angry public, self-pity is an odd shield. 

Working people struggling in a cost-of-living crisis don’t want to hear a State employee on €250,000 (who is also seeking a pay rise) whining.

And when you’ve been hired in the white heat of financial crisis, committing to be transparent, anything short of recognition of the fact that transparency in public funding is an inherent good is a ludicrous position to hold.

In RTÉ’s pre-transparency era, Bakhurst was a safe choice, in early 2023, to replace outgoing DG Dee Forbes. 

He’d all the traits the Coalition, then with taoiseach Leo Varadkar and tánaiste Micheál Martin, liked.

This wasn’t his first Irish State-paid rodeo. Bakhurst had been the managing director of news and current affairs at RTÉ and was well known to the top men. 

Varadkar and Martin saw a Cambridge-educated establishment man embedded in the BBC and British media regulator Ofcom (and RTÉ) for his entire career.

It’s been somewhat overlooked, but in the interval between the meeting with O’Donovan on Tuesday and the Media Committee hearing, Bakhurst said nothing else was due to come out in the wake of Mooney. 

As this was despite my article in the Irish Daily Mail revealing to readers there was plenty more to come, I was confused. (It happens often.)

Seán Rocks and Oliver Callan had been named to me, but we didn’t identify them.

But on Wednesday, we were told there were issues with the transparency on pay to presenters Rocks, who died last year, and Callan.

Also, Bakhurst admitted at committee, casually, that another of his key post-2023 commitments – that no RTÉ employee would be paid more than him – had been breached, repeatedly.

Back to the Cabinet minister I spoke with on Monday: ‘The new sheriff in town set a load of stringent rules, and said, “You know, nobody will be paid more than me as director general. 

'Nobody will be allowed two salaries. No nixers without going on the register. Claire Byrne, you’re great but you’re not worth the extra money.” You know, all that sort of stuff.

‘But the problem is, the rules he’s set, they’re actually too rigid for him now.’ 

The minister said after three years of Bakhurst’s tenure, ‘things are getting worse rather than better’.

RTÉ’s bailout lasts for another three years – ominously for the broadcaster, it will be coming with the begging bowl in the lead-up to a general election. 

In the summer of 2023, then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar was hardline on RTÉ but he’d subsequently softened, and had resigned before the 2024 billion-euro bailout.

People close to him told me he looked at other, harsher elements of the press and felt RTÉ was important. 

Politicians like Varadkar and Martin saw a compliant RTÉ as central to their communications strategy.

Varadkar is gone. Martin will be leaving soon. Simon Harris will be taoiseach when the next round of bailout talks begin. 

Jim O’Callaghan or Jack Chambers might be in charge of Fianna Fáil. Why would the TikTok Taoiseach need RTÉ to speak to a populace getting its news from social media?

On June 1, 2025, this page ran under the headline: ‘The worst thing to happen to RTÉ was the no-strings billion euro bailout’. 

I wrote: ‘It was probably naive to think they’d change, because cynically you have to ask: “Why would they?” 

'If you commit egregious financial mismanagement, if you indulge in rampant corporate bad practice, if your behaviour is responsible for the collapse of a licence fee revenue but your comeuppance is a €1billion bailout, why reform?’

It is a question that remains as relevant just short of a year later, as we saw this week.