Kevin Bakhurst said he was ‘infuriated' by reaction to RTE newsroom promo

Irish Independent

28-05-2025

He said the cost of filming the promo came out of RTE's annual two million euro marketing budget and cost less than 100,000 euro.
'A significant amount of the press coverage has been totally inaccurate about it,' he told TDs and Senators at committee.
When asked about props used during the filming by Fianna Fail TD Peter 'Chap' Cleere, Mr Bakhurst said that two plants were moved from elsewhere in RTE to cover up electrical points during filming before being put back.
'Even when you're filming news interviews, sometimes people wear makeup, they have lighting, you might move a plant so the shot looks better and I would expect that of our highly professional promotions team.'
He added: 'There's been some coverage about, you know, extras being brought in.
'The proper conversations were had about this between our marketing team, who were doing this, and the news management team about how we were going to do it.
'The initial request was, can some journalists from the newsroom sit in the background – they're going to be blurred out – can they sit in the background while we're filming this for several hours and the answer was 'No our journalists are too busy'.'
He also said that RTE had 'just spent 50,000 euro doing up parts of the newsroom'.
Senior RTE figures appeared before the Oireachtas media committee on Wednesday for the first time since the new Dail was formed.
In 2023 the broadcaster was sharply criticised over a series of governance and financial scandals which further fuelled a years-long trend in declining TV licence revenue.
The Government agreed a 725 million-euro financing programme for the crisis-hit national broadcaster over the next three years, coming from Exchequer-funded top-ups to licence fee sales.
RTE executives' appearance before the committee on Wednesday comes after the broadcaster confirmed that it had written down 3.6 million euro on a partly failed IT system.
Mr Bakhurst told the committee that while the write-down of public money was 'very unfortunate', it was 'very different from 2023'.
He said the main part of the project, an updated finance system, was delivered while the HR element was not.
'Big projects, and particularly big IT projects, can go wrong, and what I've looked back at is how the organisation tried to salvage that, and what are the lessons learned from that.'
He said that one example of the changes made as a result is that every month the full list of significant capital projects now go to the leadership team.
RTE's HR director Eimear Cusack told the committee that the project was properly managed.
'I was responsible for the HR element and the HR requirements. We went through a tender process,' she said.
'There were a number of vendors who participated in that process.
'The final bids, we had external evaluation of those bids to ensure that we were picking the right providers and that was the result.
'The project ran into a number of difficulties.
'I think, that there were a number of issues that arose, particularly between the contractor and the subcontractor.'
When put to her that the spec wasn't right, the right contractor wasn't chosen and it was not properly project managed, she said: 'I couldn't agree with that'.
'We put in our requirements, the contractor and the subcontractor who won the tender said that they could deliver on those requirements.
'Ultimately, the finance system was delivered upon.
'The HR system, they could not deliver on, but that was not known at the time that they signed up and they said they could deliver on it.'
Deputy director of RTE Adrian Lynch, chairman of the RTE board Terence O'Rourke, RTE chief financial officer Mari Hurley and director of commercial Gavin Deans also appeared before committee.
Ms Hurley said that there was a 4% decline in TV licence fee revenues in 2024 compared to 2023.
'The more significant declines that have been experienced in '23 have been averted,' she said.