A nice slow car crash
I know it’s probably wrong.
However I am getting a somewhat perverse pleasure from watching my old alma mater tear itself asunder in the top ranks. RTE is rarely off the news these days as some new scandal hits the headlines.
It started last September [if I remember correctly] when it transpired that RTE had understated the salary of a “top” presenter to make it appear more acceptable to the public. It came out eventually that he was paid over half a million per year. This fiasco was blamed squarely on the Director General Dee Forbes who had since resigned.
This little scandal woke the gubmint up and they started investigating the shenanigans in RTE. They discovered “barter accounts” that somehow evaded the auditors and these accounts where used, for example to purchase a couple of thousand worth of flip-flops, restaurant bills and the like.
Then “The Toy Show – The Musical” surfaced. This was a musical commissioned by someone without sanction from anyone though they claimed it was sanctioned by Dee Forbes [again]. This little exercise cost RTE €2.3 million and was a complete fiasco from the start.
Next was the resignation of the top Finance Officer. RTE claimed she left under a redundancy arrangement and received a nice little package of €450,000. Her position was promptly filled so the job wasn’t redundant after all.
The gubmint then started looking into the little bonuses being paid to top management on leaving the organisation. This caused a legal row as it seems these packages were covered by Non-Disclosure agreements.
The gubmint keeps hauling the top bods in to explain themselves. In particular they need to talk to Dee Forbes but she claims she is “not well” [since September] and can’t appear.
I feel sorry for the current Director General Kevin Bakhurst who only took over last summer. The poor bloke has been spending most of his time appearing before various committees trying to explain the mess.
I worked in RTE for nearly forty years and during that time I could see the progressive separation of top management from the staff. They became arrogant and self serving and the gulf between management and staff became ever wider. Staff were told to take pay cuts while management awarded themselves bonuses.
I had a few run-ins with them on occasion. One example was when I got two calls – one from a computer problem in a live show studio which [in my opinion] was top priority. The other call was from the Director of Finance who had some problem or other. I fixed the studio problem and only then did the other job. The director was furious at the delay. He was supposed to to receive top priority and demanded that I be fired [exact words – “I want to see him outside the gate today”]. He didn’t get his way and I stayed but he had it in for me from then on.
The news is on in the other room as I type.
The Chair of the Board of Management has suddenly resigned
They are discussing the RTE mess again……..
Absolutely typical in most organisations these days. One place you don’t come across this nonsense on the IT side of things is the exploration & production side of oil & gas. In fact it’s a standard question & goes as follows. If you have three people who are having IT issues & they are a director, trader, geologist or reservoir engineer. In what order to you deal with them. The geologist & res end come first, the trader next the director last. Ask how you explain that to the director that they have had to wait. The answer is without the first & second people the trader has nothing to trade & when they can’t work the company isn’t making money.
Rather than just oil & gas, it’s actually the difference between public and private sector.
RTE, like the BBC, NHS, Civil Service etc have senior management who wouldn’t recognise a business issue if it bit them on the arse. They’re all run by self-aggrandised posers who couldn’t hack it in the real world, yet claim they’re worth the same rewards.
The adage applied to RTE management – they are all promoted above the level of their ability. In the good old days when I first joined the place was mostly run by engineers and technical people. Over the years the accountants took over and it became a case of cost versus quality. The cost side invariably won, unless of course it involved the managers when cost became secondary.
This is the ‘Peter Principal’ in all it’s glory. “Everyone rises to their own level of incompetence.”