Ryan Tubridy finding it ‘hard to leave the house’ amid RTE scandal

Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this morning to shed light on the payment scandal that has gripped RTÉ in recent weeks.

The broadcaster under-reported the earnings of star presenter Ryan Tubridy and failed to disclose €345,000 of additional payments to him between 2017 and 2022.

Since the revelations, it has had a major impact on him as he told PAC that he has been finding it hard to leave the house.

The main points from their appearance are down below with a minute by minute update of what happened as well.

2.05pm

Noel Kelly has been criticised by TDs for his handling of invoices for €75,000 payments due to his client Ryan Tubridy for the years 2021 and 2022.

“I think your companies have serious accountancy issues here, based on the evidence you’re giving here, because the fact is this is not how companies behave,” Labour TD Alan Kelly said.

“They get instructions to pay to an anonymised, unknown company for something that’s then referred (to) as ‘consultancy fees’, and under a contract that has been negotiated with RTE for private work outside and then switches from ‘Noel Kelly’ to ‘CMS’ for the second and third year. None of this is credible, it doesn’t stand up.”

Social Democrat TD Catherine Murphy said that invoices are not a “creative” document.

“So essentially, both sides were complicit in what the chair of the (RTÉ) board said ‘designed to deceive’,” she said.

“We weren’t consulted about it,” Mr Kelly said, adding that no one told us at any stage of the nature of it.

1.55pm

Ryan Tubridy and Noel Kelly have said they were not aware chat show sponsor Renault had withdrawn from the tripartite agreement.

In response to questions from Fianna Fáil TD Paul McAuliffe, Mr Kelly said: “No, no idea”.

Mr McAuliffe asked Mr Kelly about the invoices raised for three €75,000 payments due to RTÉ, and how the first payment made by Renault had been treated differently to the following two.

“The invoices were raised with you, you have a fiduciary responsibility as director of your company. You raised two – for the same three payments – you raised them under different companies, and you raise them for different reasons, and invoiced them to different people.”

Mr Kelly replied: “We were under instruction, as you can see, ‘description from RTÉ’, ‘description from RTÉ’…”

He added: “Yeah, and they were sent under instruction to RTÉ, and we presumed that Renault were going to be paying this.”

1.40pm

Noel Kelly was pressed on the invoices raised as a consequence of the initial tripartite agreement with Renault.

He denied any attempt to collude with RTÉ to conceal the payments.

“I think the lack of credibility is on RTÉ’s side,” he said.

Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly claimed they both thought the invoices that were paid from the UK-based barter account in 2022 were actually paid by Renault, given the first of the three invoices had been paid by Renault.

“That’s the misunderstanding,” Mr Kelly said.

12.52pm

Noel Kelly has said "there have been a lot of lies" regarding the RTÉ payments issue.

Asked by Independent TD Verona Murphy whether RTÉ lied to Oireachtas committees about the details of the scandal, Mr Tubridy reiterated that he believes there have been "untruths" told.

Warned to be careful of her language, Ms Murphy said the definition of an untruth is a lie, and again posed the question if RTÉ had lied.

Mr Tubridy said he hopes RTÉ’s claims about him were based on a “misunderstanding” rather than an “intent to deceive”.

Mr Kelly said: "I think there have been a lot of lies, that's why we're here, intentional or not."

Ms Murphy also asked if pre-litigation letters have been issued on behalf of Mr Tubridy or Mr Kelly regarding this matter, to which Mr Tubridy said: "Not that I'm aware of."

12.40pm

Ryan Tubridy’s agent Noel Kelly has said it was the idea of RTÉ’s former commercial director Geraldine O’Leary to label invoices for payments due to Mr Tubridy as “consultancy fees”.

Mr Kelly said they were acting under instruction from RTÉ, “at all times”.

12.35pm

Ryan Tubridy said he was finding it hard to leave the house.

“My name has been desperately sullied, I think my reputation has been sullied.

“I’m deeply upset. I’m hurt. It’s hard to leave the house if you really want me to be honest about it.

“For what? I’ve spent three weeks watching people telling stories. I’m not looking for sympathy or violin.”

Fianna Fáil TD Cormac Devlin said children in Ireland were asking why the host of the Late Late Toy Show was on the news so much.

Mr Tubridy responded: “My relationship with the children of Ireland is so important to me.

“I know that sounds grandiose, but actually it is.

“I want them to be happy and hopeful and proud to be Irish and read lots of books and just be wonderful young people. That doesn’t change, but what’s happened the last three weeks – it’s a frenzy.”

Mr Tubridy also suggested he has been “cancelled”, with Mr Kelly lamenting “horrendous reporting” concerning the scandal.

“People here have families. People need to think about – you’re public representatives – you know what it means when you’re in the middle of something,” Mr Tubridy told the committee.

“This is my first rodeo being in the public eye (like this). I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know if any of you’ve been cancelled before but let me tell you, you don’t want to be there.”

Mr Kelly reiterated that they are both appearing before the Tuesday's committees because they had asked to appear.

“We weren’t invited, we asked, and we saw over the last three weeks, I’ve never seen such horrendous, horrendous reporting.

“And why? Suddenly the most trusted man in Ireland, Ryan Tubridy, it was like ‘throw him under a bus’. Why?”

12.30pm

Ryan Tubridy told the PAC that he wants to get back on the radio as soon as his could.

“I don’t have any doubt, I want to go back to work on the radio as soon as possible,” he said.

“I don’t say that with any arrogance. I just say it as an expressed desire: it’s what I do, it’s what I know, and I want to get back to my team and to the listeners and with my job because it’s all I’ve got.”

He added: “I understand that the amount of money we’re talking about is eye-watering, I’m not a fool, I understand that. But I haven’t changed as a person over those years, despite the extraordinary bank balance.”

Asked how he could rebuild trust, Mr Tubridy replied: “A lot of the trust was taken from me.”

In terms of restoring trust in RTÉ, Mr Tubridy said the organisation was off to a “good start” with the appointment of new director-general Kevin Bakhurst.

He added: “I think that hopefully people will see what I’ve said today and will hear what I’m saying today and they’ll realise that a lot of what’s happened over the last few weeks, I’ve been dragged into a mess not of my own making.”

12.20pm

Green Party TD Marc O Cathasaigh asked if, when it was stated that Ryan Tubridy got a 20 per cent pay cut, that was inclusive or exclusive of the €75,000 payments each year from either Renault or RTÉ.

Mr Kelly said the 20 per cent cut excluded the payments.

“In Ryan’s next contract, his salary was €440,000 per annum, which was €200,000 for radio, €240,000 for TV. That was €105,000 reduction per year by five, so that was €525,000.

“It didn’t include the €120,000 that he didn’t take, the Renault €75,000 was a completely separate contract, so this was on his TV and radio earnings.”

Mr Tubridy said he understood “the room for perception issues” around treating the payments from Renault as separate.

12.15pm

Ryan Tubridy said documents were submitted to PAC members late on Tuesday morning, just two hours before the committee appearance, due to wanting to “get things right”.

He told Green Party TD Marc O Cathasaigh that he did seek advice from “a team of people” on how to deal with the crisis, and he assumed they were paid.

Mr Tubridy also told committee members he was not advised to delay handing over documentation until after 8.30am on Tuesday, and he apologised for the delay.

“The last three weeks have been chaotic, they have been destructive, they have been beyond difficult, and all I’ll say to you is that we wanted to get things right today because so many people have been getting things wrong,” he said.

12pm

Mr Kelly has stressed that the tripartite agreement with Renault was not part of Mr Tubridy's contract with RTÉ.

Mr Kelly rejected the suggestion that the deal with Renault was designed to compensate for the pay reduction Mr Tubridy had signed up to with his new RTÉ broadcasting contract.

“This was a separate contract for separate services,” he said.

11.45am

Sinn Féin TD Imelda Munster questioned Mr Kelly about the tripartite agreement, with Mr Kelly stating the commitment was requested to ensure the arrangement would continue if the sponsor changed.

“I asked for the deal to be underwritten because the relationship with the sponsor is with RTE, it’s not with us,” he said.

Mr Kelly was also asked why he had written “consultancy fees” on the invoices he raised for the €75,000 payments for 2021 and 2022 and not put Mr Tubridy’s name on them. He said he was following instructions from RTÉ.

“We acted, at all times, on instructions from RTÉ,” he said.

He added: “We trusted the process, why would we not trust the process?”

11.30am

Ryan Tubridy's agent Noel Kelly has claimed there was "no secret" that RTÉ was to underwrite a commercial deal with Renault regarding payments to Mr Tubridy.

In his opening speech to the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Kelly disputed comments made before the committee last week by RTÉ's former chief financial officer Breda O'Keeffe.

Mr Kelly referred the committee to an email supplied to PAC members on Tuesday morning, in which Ms O'Keeffe said the broadcaster could provide a side letter to underwrite the €75,000 annual fee.

RTÉ disputed these claims in a statement on Tuesday morning prior to the commencement of the PAC hearing.

Mr Kelly also claimed that RTÉ's figures regarding Mr Tubridy remunerations were also incorrect.

"This is not the Ryan Tubridy scandal. This is the RTÉ scandal," Mr Kelly added.

11.25am

Mr Tubridy apologised to his colleagues at RTÉ and thanked people across the country for their support amid the controversy.

He said he understood the anger among his colleagues at claims by RTÉ that he had been paid more than was publicly declared.

“I understand that, and we’re going to deal with all of that in the next few hours, and indeed the next six hours, or more – we’ll stay for as long as it takes,” Mr Tubridy told the committee.

“I’m very sorry for those whose lives have been made difficult with an incessant dripping of new revelations. I’m thinking particularly, my radio show colleagues and friends, that they’ve had to be put through all of this for reasons not of their own making.

“I’d like to thank the many people from across the country who have taken time to stop me on the street, decent Irish citizens, taking my shoulder or my elbow in their hands and saying ‘you’ll get through this’.

“I have nearly a foot off the ground high of cards and letters from people who’ve written to ‘Ryan Tubridy, Dublin’.”

11.20am

Ryan Tubridy has challenged seven "untruths" put forward about the payments scandal at RTÉ.

Delivering his opening statement to the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Tubridy said he wished to bring “maximum transparency” and address “misinformation” that he says has been circulating about undeclared payments made to him in recent years.

Mr Tubridy told the committee: “We will be presenting key documents and new information to the two committees, which we believe will bring maximum transparency to the situation and address much of the misinformation which has circulated over the past three weeks.

“This is the first opportunity we have had to set out the full facts of what occurred, and we have spent weeks reviewing all the information about these issues.”

He said the payments issues was not a factor in his decision to retire as presenter of the Late Late Show, explaining he had made the decision prior to this issue coming to light, citing burnout following the Covid-19 pandemic.

10.55am

Broadcaster Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly are appearing before two Oireachtas committees on Tuesday.

Undeclared payments to Mr Tubridy, in a deal negotiated by Mr Kelly, are at the centre of the ongoing RTÉ payment scandal.

They will appear before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) at 11am, followed by the Oireachtas Media Committee from 3pm.

Senator Malcolm Byrne, a member of the Oireachtas Media Committee, said Mr Tubridy and Mr Kelly must "provide pieces of the jigsaw" and explain why they did not correct undeclared payments in RTÉ's figures.

Mr Byrne told BreakingNews.ie: "I certainly think the details of that arrangement from Noel Kelly and Ryan Tubridy's perspective will need to be outlined but also why neither Ryan Tubridy nor Noel Kelly sought to correct the record when the salaries were being published.

"They knew at the time the Oireachtas and the public were being misled, but they did not look to correct the record," he added.

-Additional reporting by Press Association