Just when senior RTE executives hoped that the posse of aggressive public representatives was fading away. After the hullabaloo over Ryan Tubridy’s earnings and the murky barter account had died down, it emerged this month that RTE paid a €450,000 exit package to Breda O’Keeffe, the broadcaster’s former chief financial officer, and €200,000 to Rory Coveney, the station’s former director of strategy.
Were that not enough, the following days descended into farce as two Oireachtas committees squabbled over who should get to do the grilling. Catherine Martin, the media minister, then went on national television to reveal that she had been “misinformed” twice over whether an exit package agreed in October last year for Richard Collins, the finance director, had gone to the board.
Her department had actually been told last October that Collins’s package was considered by the remuneration committee of the board. Yet no matter, in the small hours of Friday morning — normally a time for infomercials and Golden Girls reruns — Siún Ní Raghallaigh, chairwoman of the RTE Authority and part of the team cleaning up RTE’s governance mess, resigned.
It is worth looking at the various exits on their merits. Brian Stanley, chairman of the public accounts committee, has asked: “Why did Rory Coveney receive what is an exit package when he resigned? If he went voluntarily, why was he given a golden handshake?”
I see no big problem with the payment made to Coveney: his job was being abolished and RTE was effectively buying him out of his contract. His only mistakes were to have a high-paying job in the public sector that triggered a large exit payment; to be the recipient of a legitimate payment that became publicly associated with questionable payments made to others; and to have a high-profile brother. Other than managing a new musical, an inherently speculative venture that lost money, what precise wrong is Coveney alleged to have committed?
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By contrast, I see very serious problems with the payment to O’Keeffe. It was recently reported in The Irish Times that “’O’Keeffe had originally suggested the broadcaster could make savings of €200,000 by making the CFO role redundant”. On what planet does she imagine that the national broadcaster, with nearly 2,000 employees and annual revenue around €350 million, could function without an appropriately remunerated head of finance?
According to a report prepared by the solicitors McCann FitzGerald for RTE, O’Keeffe’s exit package was not brought before the RTE executive board for approval and was the only case in which the terms of the station’s voluntary redundancy programme were not adhered to. O’Keeffe’s package did not, we are told, stick to the terms of a voluntary redundancy programme, it did not see the end of her position and it was not brought to the attention of the RTE board.
There might be cases when the boards of private sector companies interpret the law on redundancy payments to craft a tax-efficient ex-gratia payment to a senior director who is retiring anyway. It’s up to the boards of such companies to decide whether to direct company money to such a purpose. And it’s up to Revenue to prevent tax breaks being abused in the process.
But RTE is not a private company. It is a public company, disposing of our monies. Eimear Cusack, RTE’s HR director, signed off on the €450,000 package, even though the associated documentation stated “approved by the executive board”, something she knew not to be the case. That is very hard to defend.
Martin, the elected representative charged with supervising RTE, hit out a week ago at the “shocking” €450,000 exit package awarded to the former finance chief. She hauled Kevin Bakhurst, the RTE director-general, and Ní Raghallaigh, chairwoman of the RTE board, into her department last Monday.
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The exit package that Martin finds shocking was not subject to board scrutiny where Ní Raghallaigh might have blocked it. The package for the finance boss Collins was subject to some level of board approval, which the minister also found shocking, it seems, if only because she did not know that it was. Martin is engaged in the pretence that any bad things that happen can’t be down to her; they must always be someone else’s fault.
Amid all the brouhaha, Martin found time to tweet about the forthcoming constitutional referendum, saying: “It’s not reflective of today’s society for our constitution to say that a woman’s place is in the home.”
This, and similar comments, prompted a clarification from Marie Baker — the Supreme Court judge who chairs the Electoral Commission, the body that the government set up to ensure electoral integrity — that the constitution does not say a woman’s place is in the home, but merely that mothers provide an “important support” to society and shouldn’t “have to go out to work” due to “economic necessity”. Martin’s remark was also corrected in the Community Notes on Twitter/X. Yet when asked whether she would correct her erroneous tweet, the minister declined.
Many years ago I heard Professor Declan Kiberd describe the Irish as “apple-lickers”. Imagine if the Book of Genesis had featured Paddy and Eve in the Garden of Eden, instead of Adam and Eve. Rather than eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Paddy would have licked it. That would allow him to enjoy the best of both worlds: tasting the fruit while avoiding divine retribution for eating it.
The current RTE saga is emblematic of our apple-licking approach to public sector management. The station has all the corporate and legislative architecture needed to deliver good governance. RTE has internal auditors, an internal executive committee, a board of independent directors, experts can be commissioned to investigate any matter, and there is a government department exercising oversight, which is also carried out by several Oireachtas committees. Yet we have no effective accountability and, certainly, no divine retribution.
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Cusack described her signing of the O’Keeffe package as “an administrative oversight” and approval was given by “the ultimate decision-maker” in Dee Forbes, the former director-general. She added that “no such single-line approval” could be given now. It should not have been given at all, and one wonders why Cusack is still employed by the station.
As regards to the operation of its barter account and O’Keeffe’s €450,000 redundancy payment, are we simply happy to accept Bakhurst’s explanation that this is how things used to be done in RTE? Is there no other fallout for those involved?
For a system to function it is not enough to have procedures and systems. One must also have incentives that encourage good behaviour and sanctions that discourage poor behaviour. Our incentive-free, sanction-free public culture imagines that moral exhortation — on its own — is sufficient. Little wonder that culture lets us down so often.
PS:
A new review and meta-analysis of 218 studies covering more than 14,000 participants has just concluded that exercise is often more effective at treating depression than antidepressants.
Michael Noetel, lead author of the analysis published in The BMJ, summarised the findings in The Conversation: “We found walking, running, strength training, yoga and mixed aerobic exercise were about as effective as cognitive behaviour therapy — one of the gold-standard treatments for depression. The effects of dancing were also powerful.”
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Clearly, antidepressants help some people. And of course people must listen to their doctors when considering how to respond to depression. But the clear evidence here shows that if you have depression, you should develop an exercise plan, whether you’re taking antidepressants or not.
Exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Although walking or jogging were effective for both men and women, strength training was more effective for women, and yoga and qigong were more effective for men. Yoga was somewhat more effective among older adults, and strength training was more effective among younger people.
The benefits from exercise tended to be proportional to the intensity prescribed, with vigorous activity being better. Just thinking about all this is making me feel better already.
