"Maybe the taxpayer has been defrauded," the tired-looking chief financial officer Richard Collins said yesterday, mid-way through the second day of questioning.

It was a point where at least some of the jelly appeared to be sticking.

Later in the day, Sinn Féin's John Brady asked if Mr Collins would be making a statement to the gardaí in light of the fact that he had suggested fraud. 

Mr Collins said that he would have to get legal advice on the matter.

It summed up an afternoon of lengthy exchanges where politicians got snippets of information at different times and from different witnesses.

We do know that the key players in the organisation operated in silos where scraps of information about the undeclared Tubridy deal were scattered across Montrose, with different people picking up various snippets.

No one of course had the full picture, apart from maybe former director general Dee Forbes, who has not appeared before either of the committees as requested, citing health grounds.

Two long days of interrogation have also provided an insight into a system where cash was sloshed around and used to entertain commercial clients with trips to the Rugby World Cup, tickets to soccer games, golf outings, dinners,  and gigs.

The barter account, a mechanism which it appears many of the top brass in RTÉ knew little about up until recently, let alone the public who have been contributing their taxes to it, has gained much attention both at the PAC and the Media Committee.

"This is a slush fund, let's stop calling it a barter account," Fine Gael TD Colm Burke said at one point.

It may not have been the most lavish in terms of overall expenditure, but an organised night out for a U2 gig showed the lengths RTÉ's top executives were willing to go to in order to impress their clients.

Ahead of the concert in Dublin's Croke Park, dinner was arranged in Drumcondra's Twenty2 restaurant and a coach was then hired to take the group to the gig — a journey which given the concert crowds and road closures probably would have taken less time on foot that night.

Pressed on the 2019 gig, director of commercial Geraldine O'Leary said it was part of what she called "client representation".

The gig also appeared to coincide with a bring-your-partner-to-work day as Ms O'Leary admitted that her husband "probably attended", but then again it was accepted practice to bring along a plus-one to such events.

There were more details of a golf outing in the exclusive K Club resort in Co Kildare, which Ms O'Leary again would more than likely have attended, but only the dinner afterwards.

Despite questioning RTÉ executives for four hours yesterday, PAC did not get a chance to forensically go through the €1.25m account as it was used "hundreds" of times for various events. But these expenditures included €111,000 for flights and accommodation to take advertising clients in 2019 to the Rugby World Cup in Japan, 10-year IRFU tickets worth €138,000, and tickets and accommodation for the Champions League final in Madrid in 2019, worth €26,000.

Sinn Féin's Imelda Munster said that this was "fairly flippant with taxpayers' money".

RTÉ chair Siún Ní Raghallaigh agreed that the expenditure which was done through the barter account was "outrageous".

"Expenditure like that should go through the procurement system. I do believe that’s now been put in place."

However, this level of spending was only part of a wider insight gleaned into the State broadcaster, where some people are clearly worth significantly more than others and where a labyrinth-like system was set up to acknowledge that 'talent' in the case of Mr Tubridy's additional payments.

Even the use of the word 'talent' to describe a select few within the organisation only reinforced a culture where some are revered, as many others busily scuttle away behind them to ensure their stars continue to shine.

It was an element that chair of the board Ms Ní Raghallaigh addressed in her opening statement.

Words matter and the term, as it is currently used, reinforces a ‘them and us’ culture in RTÉ. It implies some have greater worth than others. The first step in cultural change is to consign this term to the dustbin.

Having used the term with abandon at the Media Committee the previous day, the senior members of RTÉ were now shunning it.

However, just a few minutes later the talent, or at least the term, had been taken out of the trash, dusted off, and was being used again by interim director general Adrian Lynch to describe Mr Tubridy and his ilk.

Words do indeed matter.

Trust also matters and it is something that RTÉ will now grapple to rebuild given the controversy that has only escalated as executives and board members have tried to explain their actions in recent days.

Ms Ní Raghallaigh yesterday described the undisclosed payments, and the way in which those payments were set up, as an "act designed to deceive".

That act involved people in the most senior ranks having some knowledge of what was going on, but not enough to have anything pinned on them. The facts were conveniently measured out into silos.

Many questions still remain, but perhaps the most important is how RTÉ can ever regain public trust when the top executives didn't even trust each other with all the details.