Answering them with contained fury. 

Asserting their pride in their work, their appreciation of their colleagues, and their absolute dissatisfaction with management practices as revealed by the Ryan Tubridy scandal.

Inside what used to be called Montrose, a promised statement about the issue was being prepared. 

It seemed reasonable to assume that statement might issue around 3pm. Or maybe 4pm.

But then five o’clock came without a statement. 

Coming up on six o’clock, it was easy to guess what was going on. Lawyers explaining why the desirable clarity of this individual clause would lead to the organisation being sued six ways from Tuesday. 

The communications advisor looking at their watch and explaining that media — including RTÉ’s own news and current affairs producers and reporters — were already furious, and would be made even more furious by being handed a statement so late as to preclude proper analysis.

Nobody had time to relish the irony of an organisation mandated to inform, educate, and entertain finding it impossible to fulfill the first of those in a timely manner on an issue going to the heart of RTÉ’s values.

Earlier, Minister Catherine Martin had upped the ante by stating she hoped the statement would bring “clarity to the names of those who provided legal advice and financial advice to former director general Dee Forbes”. 

Not amenable to misunderstanding, that specification. 

Similarly, the minister, who doesn’t usually use such blunt language, this time expressed an unambiguous expectation that the statement identify “who signed off on the payments”. 

Which it kind of did. Kind of.

The nine pages establish that two key managers signed off on them. 

One was RTÉ’s commercial director. The other was director general, Dee Forbes. But the statement specifically exculpates the former from being complicit in the inaccuracy of official published compensation figures for Ryan Tubridy.

“No member of the RTÉ Executive Board, other than the Director General, had all the necessary information in order to understand that the publicly declared figures for Ryan Tubridy could have been wrong,” says the document. 

This explains the suspension of Ms Forbes last week. 

The report is scrupulous about the fact that those writing it weren’t in a position to get any responses from the former director general, who has also claimed that ill health prevents her from answering the questions two Oireachtas committees want to put to her, one of them today.

So Ms Forbes is the one who signed off on the payments. Other senior staff may have been aware of parts of the arrangement, but not necessarily the entire thing, including one senior manager who is described as having been “aware of elements of the commercial agreement but not RTÉ’s underwriting of it”. 

This is one of the few imprecisions in an otherwise clear statement. The reader wonders what precisely were the “elements” about which this person was aware. The givers of legal advice are not identified.

Mr Tubridy emerges unscathed from this statement. There was no wrongdoing on his part, it concludes. Given how scathed he is elsewhere, that can be of minimal consolation to him.

One of the most interesting aspects of the statement is its surprising defiance of the minister’s demand that names be named. 

The statement simply doesn’t go along with this request. It gives the role but not the name of the only person, other than Ms Forbes, who knew about this Byzantine arrangement, gives the role of the talent agent but not the name, and doesn’t name the individual who was aware of “elements” of the agreement. 

No names, no pack drill. Except that the most simplistic research allows today’s newspapers to print those names.

The document fails to nail down who came up with the method of deception: Invoices talking of “consultancy fees.” 

This person couldn’t remember and that person couldn’t remember, it says, while giving enough detail to establish that this arrangement, from RTÉ’s point of view, was a costly dud. 

Costly long before RTÉ’s own staff protested outside HQ about the reputational and moral cost. 

Costly in ways the statement doesn’t begin to envisage.

Today, members of the first of two Oireachtas committees will deal with whoever pitches up from RTÉ, not including Ms Forbes. 

The fact that at least two other top managers have ensured that their names were not included in the statement may or may not be an indicator of their willingness to appear in Leinster House. 

They may figure annoying those committees by not turning up may be preferable to going swimming in what one uninvolved public servant described last night as “a sea of vanities and competitive indignation”. 

We will see.