My old haunting ground
There is a bit of a scandal here over my old employer.
For those of you outside the Emerald Isle, the scandal involves payments to the top earners in RTE.
In my glory days as a computer programmer two of the systems I maintained were the payroll systems. These were neatly separated into two separate systems -Salary and Fees. The former was for staff and the latter was used for example for actors or other people contracted on a temporary basis.
As a programmer I naturally had full access to both systems. One of the first things I noticed was that some of the top “big names” were being paid via the Fees system and not the Salary. I realised that they had set up their own one-man companies and as such were being contracted rather than salaried. This allowed for all sorts of shenanigans with tax and accounting. In fact the top earner wasn’t on either system and was dealt with on some private system that no one had access to.
The latest hoopla is over the earnings of the current top of the heap – Ryan “Twiglet” Tubridy where RTE understated his earnings by a mere €345,000. This, note, is not his salary but earnings on top of his salary that were outside the system. Strangely no one, not least Tubridy himself, seemed to notice this discrepancy.between the published salary and the actual one. I have a feeling that if my pension jumped or dropped by €345,000 I might notice? Maybe not.
None of the latest surprises me. When I worked there I was well aware of the backhander deals, the corruption, the nepotism and abuses of the system.
I could write a book about it.
But no one would believe it.
Hi. Fellow (half) Irish Grandpa here. We used to and still do accuse foreigners of being more corrupt (Ukraine, Russia, China, India, Brazil, and all of Africa and the Middle East). What is never acknowledged is that Western governmental system has always been corrupt, and their buddies in the media alongside them, are complicit. They used to be better at hiding it under the ‘old school tie’ network when it was indirect, nepotic (is that a word?), or simply related to the award of bogus contracts. Now the virtual signallers are all being exposed (by better communications networks outside their control) for the hypocrites they are (we love immigrants, but won’t pay our taxes) but yet they still refuse to crawl back under the rocks where they belong, while we continue to be taxed to the hilt. Slimeballs.
Welcome Philip. I have decided in my dotage that nearly everyone outside my property boundary is probably corrupt or stupid, or in some cases both.
According to Bertie Ahern, Tubridy wouldn’t have had any problems if, like Bertie, he had got the money in cash.
Maybe there were a few brown envelopes? Nothing would surprise me these days.
Just like the BBC, and it doesn’t matter if you, or any other of the peasantry notice or scream it from the rooftops.
It’s not your RTE, or your country, just like it’s not my BBC or mine.
Can’t say I watch too much RTE (or BBC) but if I did, apart from the accent and a few local references, I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference.
The only programmes I watch on RTE are the News/Weather and the odd Current Affairs. Most of my viewing these days is on Netflix. Currently enjoying Breaking Bad [again].
Only EU300,000 or so ? Thats peanuts, our own UK man gets in excess of 1.5 million per annum from our official broadcaster, plus unknown income from advertising.
The thing that winds a lot of people up is that RTE has been winging for years how they are broke and desperately need more cash. Staff had to take pay cuts, yet all the while Tubridy was actually getting pay increases well over the half million mark, using strange and backhanded “special” accounts. And don’t forget that RTE has a potential audience around one tenth of the BBC.
Hi Grandad
Long time lurker here from the north. I’ve been reading your blog for years now and it only seems to get better with age. I’m half Irish like Philip and I agree with every word he said. Getting older in UK/Ireland is a bit shit these days. We can see them for what they are, but no-one younger is going to believe us and so it goes on.
O/T, have you seen Longrider recently? I also read his blog regularly and it seems to be down.
Live long and blog.
Eric
Welcome Eric! Longrider has indeed got a problem. I find if I refresh the browser a couple of times the annoying SSL message disappears. Hopefully the problem will be resolved very shortly, as there is a lot of work being done in the background [*cough*].