Chambers refused to back open-ended RTÉ redundancy scheme, documents show
Minister for Public Expenditure
Jack Chambers
was 'not prepared to give consent' for a multiannual voluntary exit programme for staff at
RTÉ
, newly released official documents show.
The
Department of Public Expenditure
said in a letter in March to the
Department of Arts and Media
that any such move would 'deviate from the typical approach to exit schemes in the commercial semi-State sector and may pose challenges in terms of the oversight of the scheme's implementation'.
The letter said the Minister believed 'RTÉ may seek consent for a further voluntary exit programme in 2026'.
Former Minister for Arts and Media
Catherine Martin
gave her approval for the RTÉ redundancy scheme last year but the Department of Public Expenditure had sought further clarification on issues before final authorisation was granted at the end of March.
READ MORE
As part of its sanction, the Department of Public Expenditure said the Department of Arts and Media must be satisfied that implementing the scheme 'would not lead to additional direct exchequer funding in 2025, 2026 and 2027'.
'There should be no presumption as to what Government may decide as to any exchequer funding for RTÉ in 2026 and 2027.'
It said the Department of Arts and Media and RTÉ 'should not make any assumptions about the front-loading early in either 2026 or 2027 of any exchequer funding as a primary mitigating measure to cash exposure'.
'The exclusion of senior management from the voluntary exit programme is approved on the basis of RTÉ's assurances that there will be no further voluntary exits from the leadership team. If this changes during 2025 any exit package will follow the terms of voluntary exit programme 2025.'
It said the Department of Arts and Media 'must be informed before any exit package being agreed with a member of the leadership team'.
Official correspondence shows the Department of Public Expenditure was anxious over a number of months that the proposed redundancy scheme at RTÉ should not be open-ended.
In January it told the Department of Arts and Media it would be necessary for it to review and reauthorise any scheme on an annual basis.
'This may involve changes to the scheme to control costs,' it said.
The Department of Public Expenditure said staff at RTÉ should be made aware that the terms of exit scheme being run in 2025 were 'specific to this iteration' and there were no guarantees that scheme or the terms on offer initially would be maintained in later years.
On February 24th the secretary general of the Department of Arts and Media, Feargal Ó Coigligh, said in a letter to the Department of Public Expenditure: 'While I appreciate that multiannual voluntary exit programmes have not been previously sanctioned, as has been set out in previous submissions, a degree of flexibility is required to enable the transition from in-house to commissioned and independently produced content. This is a process which requires lead-in times for replacement content, and by virtue of the voluntary nature of the exit scheme, the potential redeployment of resources within RTÉ.'
RTÉ said last Friday it had received 325 applications for its voluntary exit programme. The scheme formed part of a five-year strategy announced in 2023 where the broadcaster outlined a plan to reduce staff numbers by up to 400.
In an email to staff last Friday RTÉ director general
Kevin Bakhurst
said applications to leave under the programme would be approved where 'it is confirmed that the role can be suppressed or that equivalent savings can be made by suppressing an alternative post and/or redeploying an employee into that role'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
The Irish economy grew by 22% over the past year. Yes, you read that right
Ireland's economic data was always going to be a bit special at the start of this year. But Thursday's figures were mind-bending. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which we now stand out in international comparisons. And this is not just a curiosity – it matters. The economy, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) , was 22 per cent larger in the first quarter of 2025 than one year earlier, according to the latest estimates from the Central Statistics Office . Think about it. The figures suggest that for every €1 of activity last year, there was €1.22 in 2025. Even comparing GDP in the first quarter of this year with the last quarter of 2024, there is a rise of close to 10 per cent – this is roughly the extent of growth across the euro zone over the past decade. Of course this bonkers data is not real, in the sense that it does not reflect what is happening in the underlying economy in which we all live. How could it? As has been long discussed the headline economic data is entirely distorted by the activities and tax planning of a small number of very big US tech and pharma companies. From time to time, this has created huge distortions in the figures. A decade ago, top US economist Paul Krugman famously described a 26 per cent GDP growth rate reported for the Irish economy (later revised up to over 30 per cent) as 'leprechaun' economics . At the time the figures were distorted by massive tax-driven investments by the companies concerned, including Apple, essentially a manoeuvre by the companies involved to try to keep their tax bills down as international rules changed. READ MORE Now, as one observer put it, we are seeing another 'Krugman' moment. This time the reasons are different. Big pharma companies have been rushing product over to the US to try to get drugs and key ingredients into the market before Donald Trump announces tariffs on the sector. This has led to a surge in exports, feeding into the GDP data. Many of these are manufactured here – and some are made elsewhere but organised by Irish subsidiaries and so also show up in our figures. And so we see a massive surge in Irish GDP in the first quarter of this year. A big – temporary – decline in pharma exports in GDP will follow at some stage, as the firms involved must now have massive stocks jammed into every free warehouse in the US. Much will depend on how the tariffs story plays out. [ Welcome (back) to the era of Leprechaun economics Opens in new window ] Whether Krugman renews his leprechaun offensive or not, let's not pretend this won't be noticed. Ireland's GDP data is not some irrelevance in a quirky economic corner. The amounts of money being moved through Ireland are now enormous. Daniel Kral, chief economist at Oxford Economics , calculates that Ireland – which accounts for 4 per cent of the euro zone economy – accounted for half its total growth over the past year. Analysts have taken to looking at the figures 'excluding Ireland'. How do we pull back from all of this to judge the underlying health of the economy? Total demand in the domestic economy – adjusted by the CSO to remove the multinational factors - rose just 1 per cent over the year. But we need to look under the surface here, too. Consumer spending, a good measure of how we feel, was up by a decent 2.5 per cent. But the overall figure was dragged down by a fall in business investment, presumably reflecting the international uncertainty. So households continued to spend in the first part of the year, but businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach to big capital spending. This is likely to be reflected in the jobs market as the year goes on – and here AI is also changing the game in many sectors. Consumers may get more cautious too. Uncertainty is starting to slow the economy and this is a trend we need to watch as the year goes on. The piece of data that seemed a bit out of line this week was a 30 per cent fall in corporation tax in May compared with the same month last year. This was affected by the comparison with a strong May last year – which the Department of Finance suggests was boosted by once-off factors. Two of our biggest taxpayers, Pfizer and Microsoft – pay significant amounts of tax that month. But the key early indicator for most of the big companies is June – and what happens here will give a good pointer for the year as a whole. The figures do underline one point. It is our huge reliance on the opaque affairs of four or five massive companies – and our exposure to the sectors they operate in, their own performance and complex decisions on how their tax structures are set up. Our latest bout of data exceptionalism again puts Ireland in the spotlight, when it would have been better to keep the head down. It underlines the outsize take Ireland is getting from pharma and tech activity in the EU – both contentious points in the White House. Notably, the US added Ireland to an economic watch list this week, based on the size of our trade surplus. We are very much on the radar in Washington. Our corporate tax take and manufacturing base are looked on enviously not only from the US , but from elsewhere in Europe. [ 'No long-term commitments to anything' – Ireland's economy is experiencing a silent slowdown Opens in new window ] The advance shipping of products again focuses attention on the scale of activity and tax planning in Ireland by big pharma companies. And this causes a rollercoaster of cyclical activity. But what really counts is longer-term, structural issues. Will these pharma giants decide over time – and it would take years – to relocate some of their production to the US? Will their profits and thus tax payments here be hit by Trump's policies? Or will they – or some of the tech giants – alter their corporate structures so that they pay significantly less tax here? It comes down to whether Trump's policies change the way the economic and corporate world operates fundamentally, a fair bit or not much at all. As Ireland benefits from the current system so much, the more it changes, the more risks there are for us. The coming months will tell a lot.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Nine-figure payouts to Ryanair and Starbucks CEOs are controversial, but Michael O'Leary can point to results
Michael O'Leary has hit his target. Ryanair 's share price stayed above €21 for 28 days, earning him a €125 million bonus if he stays until 2028. The deal has its critics. 'Morally questionable,' said Luke Hildyard of the High Pay Centre, a UK think tank. Others argue such payouts reward luck more than leadership, with cheap oil, index inclusion and billions in share buybacks all helping lift Ryanair's stock. O'Leary might counter that Ryanair shares have more than doubled since the deal was struck in 2019, comfortably outperforming rival airlines. Contrast that with Starbucks , where Brian Niccol was handed a reported $113 million sign-on package last August to replace embattled CEO Laxman Narasimhan. Shares soared 25 per cent on the news, adding $21 billion in market value. READ MORE [ Corporate tax receipts drop 30% as Trump's tariffs bite Opens in new window ] Since then, Starbucks has slashed head office jobs, trimmed menus and promised a return to its coffeehouse roots. But the results remain bitter. Margins and profits are down. Competition remains fierce in China. The stock tanked after last month's earnings miss and has now given up almost all of its Niccol bump. Niccol may yet prove his worth – his turnaround of Chipotle is textbook stuff – but the caffeine hit investors got from his arrival has faded fast. O'Leary, never one to miss a jab, might well look at Starbucks and say: at least I had to do something to get my millions.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
FD Technologies chairwoman urges investors to back takeover
FD Technologies chair Donna Troy has urged investors to back a £541.6 million (€643.04 million) sale of the Newry-based data and analytics company to US private equity firm TA Associates at a special meeting on June 30th, saying there are risks to it delivering on its full potential as a standalone public company. The company's remaining business, KX, which analyses large data sets in real time to help companies predict and respond to market conditions across the various business areas, may be hampered by 'uncertain public markets' if it needs to accelerate investment to capture opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI). 'Furthermore, FD Technologies is a relatively small player in a large, but fast-moving, fragmented market,' Ms Troy said in a letter to shareholders, contained in documents relating to the planned deal, published on the company's website on Friday. 'Competing with a number of larger, very well capitalised software providers and consequently the FD Technologies, directors are cautiously aware of execution risk to delivering its strategy and the associated value to FD Technologies shareholders.' READ MORE The deal with TA Associates, first announced a month ago, follows a big restructuring at the Dublin-listed company last year. This led to the group selling its former core First Derivatives division to US software group EPAM in a £236.1 million transaction and the spin-off of another business, called MRP , into a merger. It subsequently returned £120 million to shareholders in January through a stock buyback deal. How to manage your pension in these volatile times Listen | 37:00 FD Technologies confirmed that it has secured irrevocable commitments from shareholders behind 56.7 per cent of its stock for the TA Associates deal. It will need approval from holders of 75 per cent of its shares to get the transaction over the line through the mechanism, known as a scheme of arrangement, that TA Associates is using to execute the takeover. Shareholders are being offered the choice of taking cash for their stock or rolling their shares into the bid vehicle. 'The FD Technologies board does not give any recommendation to FD Technologies shareholders as to whether they should elect for the alternative offer [of taking shares in the bid vehicle],' the company said. 'FD Technologies shareholders should determine whether acquiring or holding rollover shares is affected by the laws or regulations of the relevant jurisdiction in which they reside and consider the advantages and disadvantages of electing for the alternative offer, and whether rollover shares are a suitable investment in light of their own personal circumstance.'
