If there were one thing to be gleaned from Wednesday’s Oireachtas media committee session with RTÉ’s leadership team, it is that the political focus has well and truly moved on since last summer.
One of the big talking points to come out of last June’s session with director general Kevin Bakhurst and co was the issue of outsourcing. The former BBC News editor was forced at the time to deny that the national broadcaster’s transformation plan – a central plank of which is a contentious move to increase spending on outsourced, “independent” productions – was tantamount to privatisation of in-house programming. All this after he was peppered with questions on the matter by members of the committee.
Very little oxygen was expended on that issue on Wednesday. Instead, attention had largely shifted to RTÉ’s latest financial foul-up: the €3.7 million or so written off on a troubled capital spending project to replace a legacy IT system in the organisation.
But outsourcing has not gone away. Just last week, RTÉ announced plans to switch production of some religious programming – specifically, “Christian worship content”, as the broadcaster put it in a statement – to outside producers. It means Masses will no longer be broadcast from Donnybrook and will, instead, be produced by churches nationwide.
Asked briefly about it on Wednesday, Bakhurst said RTÉ hopes to get a “different and a better product” out of the move and denied the broadcaster is phasing out religious programming.
That will be cold comfort for staff, who are already concerned about the outsourcing of flagship programming such as Fair City and the Late Late Show, as announced last year. RTÉ’s group of unions has reportedly written to the organisation’s head of HR to request a meeting about last week’s announcement.
Asked on Wednesday about morale within RTÉ, Bakhurst diplomatically noted that it was “very mixed”. Change is “very difficult”, he said, and there remains “a very high level of anger and disappointment” about the 2023 secret payments scandal.
In some areas of the organisation, however, morale is “very good”, the director general claimed. Against a backdrop of redundancies and outsourcing, it is difficult to imagine where these pockets of good feeling might be.
