The Noel Kelly/Ryan Tubridy bus pulled up at breakfast time and the least expected person went under it before anybody finished their cornflakes.
Breda O’Keeffe, RTÉ’s former CFO, who had been deadly impressive in her unheralded appearance last week, was contradicted with evidence by the statement from the agent and the broadcaster. Dee Forbes, on the other hand, was somewhat retrieved from beneath the same bus.
The central thesis of the crisp, detailed statement from agent and client was that RTÉ’s financial people weren’t just babes in the wood who couldn’t add or subtract that well. They were worse. They didn’t have the cop-on to contact Noel Kelly before issuing figures, as he had asked them to do, so he could help them get things right before they got things wrong.
The statement slid over the possibility of a moral imperative residing with Kelly to correct RTÉ figures he not only knew (after publication, admittedly) to be wrong, but which inevitably, as a consequence, misled his colleagues, the public, and members of the Oireachtas.
He didn’t correct them then or thereafter, so the mis-statements of Ryan’s monies became a year-on-year unchallenged continuum. The statement didn’t apologise for this passive collusion with the mess Kelly accused RTÉ of making.
Ryan Tubridy, on the other hand, challenged seven “material untruths” put out by RTÉ. Many of them were straw men, with him denouncing lies — sorry, material untruths — nobody had put on record in the first place. Take, for example, the one that he had been covertly overpaid by RTÉ. This notion may have been floating in Ryan’s ether, but the rest of us didn’t hear it at all.
His colleagues in RTÉ haven’t ever said he was covertly overpaid. They believe he overtly agreed to pay cuts and covertly took RTÉ money to soften the blow — RTÉ money in Renault wrapping. So his Savanarola determination to nail that and other “material untruths” didn’t work. The reading of the statements, however, was arguably the best part of the performance of the two.
The second third of their day was Ryan appealing for sympathy, and — if the older female callers to Liveline are to be used as a reference point — succeeding. He was meeting his questioners more than halfway, assuring them that what they’d said was a fair point or even “obviously” a fair point, going “yes, yes, yes” in sympathy as they worked up to their question mark and announcing how rotten he felt: “This is why I’m in such a terrible state.”
Tubridy’s seeking for sympathy went as far as feathers and pillows. He used the analogy of a feather coming out of a pillow being exceptionally difficult to put back in – the feather in this instance representing his reputation.
He also reinforced supporters, talking of “cards and letters speaking words of kindness and wisdom". Again, it’s fair to assume, given the preference of younger people for electronic means of communication, that the senders of those cards and letters were older fans. He won them yesterday and reinforced them in their belief that he’s a nice fella, unfairly thumped by those bad politicians.
The last third of his appearance yesterday was short-tempered and short-syllabled. Whereas Noel Kelly kept seeking the false comfort of repeating statements that hadn’t worked the first time, such as his constant pointless reminder that RTÉ is a €360m organisation, Ryan is sensitive enough to know he had lost the room.
He may not have lost Joe Duffy’s listeners, but the TDs and Senators in front of him, who might have been expected to have a positive view of Tubs, went off him as the afternoon progressed.
Alan Kelly and Alan Dillon led the charge. Imelda Munster, who had been less than stellar in the PAC session, pursued Noel Kelly relentlessly when he tried to fob her off by blaming RTÉ for not only getting their figures wrong, but getting them wrong when a simple advance phone call to him would have prevented the error.
Munster pointed out that nothing had stopped him from correcting the published figures — “You could have set the record straight” — and he had no answer to that, retreating into the quotation from his document folder that hadn’t worked the last time he had laid it on her.
In that last third of the day, Ryan became monosyllabic and ratty. Understandably, as he said himself “It’s been a long three weeks.”
True. And it was a long single day, at the end of which it was difficult to establish what had been their objective. Noel Kelly’s position had moved from the all-powerful figure represented in his own publicity shots, seated in an armchair surrounded by his celeb clients, into an obedient servant of RTÉ, obeying whatever orders they gave him. Ryan had gone dangerously close to approving of the false invoices by describing the exercise as no more than “unorthodox".
One inescapable conclusion was that Ryan was desperate to get back on the air with the colleagues he determinedly described as friends. What was not established was whether or not he had done enough to get back into studio.
People were fascinated by the star chamber on screen. Those who love Ryan Tubridy and want him back on air will point to how upset he got at times, how he didn’t do anything illegal, how it’s all RTÉ management’s fault. Those who aren’t pushed about him will have found the repeated appeals for sympathy discomfiting and dislikeable.
Neither view is relevant to his reappearing in RTÉ studios. That depends, inter alia, on the staff in RTÉ. The new Director General has unequivocally promised to find out what the staff feel. That’s the reaction that matters. If Ryan convinced his own former colleagues of his innocence, if they respond to his repeated appeals for sympathy, then he has some possibility of returning to do something in RTÉ.
If he hasn’t and if they don’t respond in that way, he has no such possibility.