There was a moment in the middle of RTÉ's meltdown when Siún Ní Raghallaigh, then chairwoman, said the national broadcaster’s lavish corporate hospitality was “outrageous”. With public confidence shattered over the scandal and Leinster House in a state of frenzied uproar, Ní Raghallaigh seemed to strike a note of candour that was absent from other RTÉ figures. But any sense that she would be the one to take the bedraggled RTÉ board into an uncertain future came to an abrupt end in February when she resigned after a row with Catherine Martin, the Minister for Media.
Seven months on, Ní Raghallaigh is in no mood to relitigate the affair. She issued a biting statement in March, accusing the Minister of a “hands-off” approach to RTÉ's many difficulties. Martin struck back, making it clear she lost confidence Ní Raghallaigh long before the fateful Prime Time interview that the chairwoman saw as an act of “enforced dismissal” on live TV. The RTÉ board backed Ní Raghallaigh. The Cabinet backed Martin. Twice in this interview she is asked about these exchanges. Twice she declines to comment.
“I’m not going to talk about it,” she says. “I worked really, really hard. I would say I’m disappointed how it ended but I’ve said my piece about that.”
Sipping green tea in a Galway hotel, she readily accepts RTÉ's credibility has taken “a battering” but insists it is the better for new transparency rules and management structures. “What happened was wrong. I haven’t been behind the door about that.”
Ní Raghallaigh, who lives in Connemara, had no public profile before the board’s declaration of payments to Ryan Tubridy, described by then taoiseach Leo Varadkar as “clandestine”, set off an avalanche. The money trail quickly led to the barter accounts used to fund extensive junketeering, with more more than €1.5 million spent on rock concerts, rugby tickets, restaurants, flights, luxury hotels and even flip-flops. Then there was the Toy Show The Musical flop – and huge exit payments to executives who were at the top of the organisation at a time of rampant misgovernance. Licence fee sales dropped as if from a cliff, necessitating a series of Government bailouts that will continue for years.
Did she ever imagine that going public on Tubridy’s money would inevitably bring a cascade of trouble in its wake? “I’m not really going to answer that,” she says. “As chair of the board you have obligations and I have to follow the law and if you have to correct information then you have to correct it. There isn’t a choice. You can’t say: ‘Oh well, maybe we shouldn’t do this because this.’ You have to be open and that’s it.”
She was only a short time into her term when the turmoil began. All told she was chairwoman for scarcely 16 months, including the year that will be known forever as RTÉ's annus horribilis. A person close to one protagonist wryly describes the worst of it as “the summer of love”. For most in Montrose it was a time of despair, anger and alienation from a wasteful corporate culture that seemed to operating at a far remove from the very idea of public service.
Ní Raghallaigh was new to this milieu. After decades on the business side of media, she knew people in RTÉ. But she was “definitely an outsider” in the station, albeit one seized of its mission. “My heart is in public service broadcasting,” she says. “Like everybody on the outside, you have your assumptions and you think you know things. I was very open but I had my own sense of things I thought could be done better.”
So what specifically had she in mind? “Don’t drag me into it now.” Asked whether top presenter pay was too high, she replies that her preconceptions don’t matter. “When you take on the role of chair of the board you have to be open. You don’t know the ins and outs of everything nor do you have to know the ins and outs of everything because it’s not possible.”
She had a long and varied career before Montrose. She grew up in an Irish-speaking family in Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, her mother a primary school teacher from the Gaeltacht area of the county and her father a civil servant from Belfast. She was the youngest of eight children and went to work straight from school. Her first jobs were on the clerical side in trade unions, among them the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, Siptu’s forerunner. It was a time of considerable industrial unrest. She recalls paying out strike pay to Dublin dockers in 1970s.
Later, she qualified as an accountant at night, all while working full-time and a mother of three small children. “It was a bit crazy, to be honest.” She became head of finance at the Sunday Tribune during Vincent Browne’s editorship, describing a can-do ethos of camaraderie despite daunting financial challenges. “There was a sense that we could do things.”
She went on to join TG4 in a finance role when Teilifís na Gaeilge, as it was known first, was starting up with “a few Portakabins” for an office. “Nobody really wanted us. Of course Irish language speakers wanted us. But the establishment wouldn’t have been jumping up and down for joy.” Still, the station became a permanent fixture. She returned to serve as TG4 chairwoman for two terms.
She was chief of Ardmore film studios, the founding chief Troy studios in Dell’s former factory in Limerick and managing director with Tyrone Productions, the TV company cofounded by her RTÉ predecessor, Moya Doherty. Tyrone has a mass-market business, bringing international programmes to Ireland such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
Ní Raghallaigh herself established a production company, with a niche outlook. She recalls a documentary on the family of a teenage shepherd in Transylvania at the time of Romania’s accession to the EU in 2007. “Things were opening up there and life was changing,” she says. “It was not hugely removed from where Ireland had been two generations prior.”
She applied for the RTÉ post having seen it advertised on the State Boards website. She was not sounded out beforehand, no tap on the shoulder. She was interviewed on Zoom before Martin put her name forward to the Government. “I got a call one day to say we want to appoint you.”
That was November 2022. By June RTÉ was in the throes of full-blown crisis and the searing heat of a political firestorm. In a succession of bruising showdowns at the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Oireachtas media committee, the Montrose psychodrama became a something of a box-office sensation. These televised hearings often went on for hours. Happier behind the scenes, Ní Raghallaigh was in the public glare.
Did she ever see herself being caught up in the maelstrom of Oireachtas committees? “A friend of mine said to me after they had seen me on the first one: ‘If this is democracy show me the alternative.’ It’s vicious. That’s all I’ll say.”
She clarifies: “It was not vicious for me. When I use that word I’m using it in the sense I felt people were unfairly treated. Individuals were unfairly treated. It’s at a humane level. I’m just talking about the humane.”
It is right that people are held to account, she says. “By the way I wasn’t shouted at in any huge way but other people were. I didn’t see the point in that apart from somebody wanting to get a soundbite. I don’t know. And these were people … It was wrong what happened [in RTÉ] but there it wasn’t one person responsible … It is not right how people were treated as if they had no rights.”
Asked which of the two committees she refers to, she notes certain TDs were on the two panels: “I think the PAC is definitely more robust in their questioning.”
One notable absentee from those hearings was Dee Forbes, the former RTÉ director general who resigned in the early days of the tumult. Ní Raghallaigh herself apologised to Martin for not telling the Minister she had sought Forbes’s resignation before the scandal burst into the open. Has Ní Raghallaigh spoken with Forbes since then? “I haven’t spoken to her at all.”
Forbes has always insisted she can’t go before politicians for medical reasons. Would it have been better if she attended the committees? “That was totally her decision. That was the way she handled it, I guess.” Was it acceptable not to do so, in the face of the public outcry? “It’s part of the requirement ... But it’s an individual’s choice.”
If the committee hearings were akin to a “battle in war”, she says the long-term financing of broadcasting remains unresolved. True, the Government has made much of the funding deal settled in July that will provide some €725 million in public money to RTÉ in the next three years, between the exchequer and the licence fee. But Ní Raghallaigh says this is no more than a “fudge” that she sees as a microcosm of blinkered short-termism in politics.
“I say that was the lost opportunity to do something instead of half doing something which is what we continually do in this country, it’s like putting a sticking plaster on things and then we hope that it doesn’t burst,” she says.
“I’m very happy that RTÉ has the promise of the money. What I’m not happy about is that there hasn’t been a long-term grab-the-opportunity and fix this – and open up to the funding to other media. It’s just a completely lost opportunity.”
Even the antiquated clause in the Broadcasting Act that ties the licence fee to ownership of a “television set” remains unchanged, she adds.
“So you have a situation where I’ve paid my licence fee but other people are not paying their licence fee. I think it’s around 18 or 20 per cent of households who now claim not to have a TV set. They’re still accessing the content. If other people choose not to pay then the Government just pays it for them.
“Where there’s shortfall the Government will fill it in. For me paying my licence fee I’m thinking: what’s the incentive to pay your licence fee? Now I will pay my licence fee but it’s inequitable.”
So was this an act of cowardice by a Government reluctant to antagonise those not paying the licence? “You’d have to ask the politicians that. I don’t particularly understand why.”
Still, she has no regrets. “I think I served a purpose. I did a lot of the heavy lifting and not just me, all of the team, all of the board. It was a point in time. That aspect of it is over now because the organisation must get on with it. It must be let get on with it. As I’ve said there’s good people there, there’s a strong board.”
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