Roy Curtis: Why it’s RTÉ that will pay over its disregard for TV licence-payers

The TV licence renewal demand that will pop ominously through your letterbox sometime soon might as well be emblazoned with the maxim: Let them eat cake.

That sentiment – famously, if dubiously, attributed to Marie Antoinette – encapsulated the 18th century French monarchy’s condescending disregard for the peasantry.

It triggered a bloody, watershed, proletariat revolution that altered the trajectory of world history.

One that uprooted the Ancien Regime and tore down centuries- old institutions.

The Ryan Tubridy pay scandal might not quite provoke a Bastille- style storming of the RTÉ studios.

But it must surely bring the guillotine blade snapping down on the narcissistic culture of divorced-from-reality privilege that pervades the national broadcaster’s corridors of power.

RTÉ’s corporate ego dwarfs the vast and leafy D4 acreage from which it broadcasts.

A Leviathan of smugness, here is an organisation that gorges on ad revenue while demanding ever greater public funding and government bailouts.

Absurdly inflated “star” salaries are justified with a L’Oréal type flourish of their immaculately coiffured tresses. Because they’re worth it, darling.

This is an organisation that deemed it appropriate to remunerate Ray D’Arcy €450,000 in 2019. More, in other words, than the White House incumbent and leader of the free world.

Think about that for a moment, taking abundant care to ensure your jaw does not involuntarily drop to the point where it collides painfully with the floor.

Good luck to Ray if he can get it, but didn’t anybody in RTÉ’s finance department conclude that if such a loonball salary was halved it would still amount to far more than any other rival employer would be logically willing to cough up for Mr Darcy’s services?

It is almost as if RTÉ pays above the going rate as some macho demonstration of its muscle, like those bodybuilders who swan around in absurdly tight-fitting vests, apparently believing others might envy their freakish and grotesque image.

Now comes the stunning, unsettling revelation that their highest earner was paid an additional €345,000 over six years on top of the multi-million package that was declared.

That’s the price of a starter home – the rung on the property ladder beyond the reach of an entire Irish generation.

RTÉ’s hypocrisy is towering, stupefying, nauseating...

Whoever made the decision to authorise these payments has gravely undermined public confidence in the organisation, signed away the title deeds to the high moral ground that is the preferred habitat of its interviewers when interrogating politicians.

It is midsummer rather than Halloween, but, for many, the temptation to make a bonfire of all those TV licence demands will be intense, perhaps irresistible.

An organisation that runs a high-falutin’ campaign about how “truth matters” and “trust is the cornerstone of RTÉ” has itself been feeding the public a torrent of false information.

All those sanctimonious, condescending, Covid-era lectures can now be viewed through an updated prism.

We are all in this together, indeed.

The station’s NUJ members are not alone in being “angry and dismayed”.

So much for the accountability that the station routinely demands of others.

A company that prides itself on exposing the concealed grime of Irish life has been hiding its own dirty secrets.

Media in Dublin is a small, claustrophobic circle. I know a great number of talented RTÉ employees, those who reside many floors below the golden circle penthouses, who have long been outraged at how their company is run. Like the public, this latest surge of anger enflames them to boiling point.

Correctly, RTÉ staffers want to know who signed off on these secret payments and want them, when identified, held to account. It is imperative that this happens.

The growing concern within the company is that the toxic stench from Montrose’s decaying empire will only worsen, that several investigations now being launched will catch the rancid trail of other undeclared payments.

RTÉ this morning resembles a punch-drunk prize fighter staggering incoherently back and forth.

On the verge of toppling over.

Ordinarily, when a boxer is concussed and thrashing helplessly about, the impulse is to offer support and assistance.

But as the heavyweight of Irish media totters on the brink, the urge among a great number of the public is to dip into Marie Antoinette’s lexicon of indifference.

And let the perpetrators of a scandal that has impoverished RTÉ’s reputation eat cake.