Former Late Late Show presenter Ryan Tubridy should be willing to appear before an Oireachtas committee to answer questions about undeclared payments made to him by RTE, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.
Mr Varadkar also said he would like to see Dee Forbes, who resigned as director-general of the broadcaster shortly after the payments controversy was made public, tell her side of the story at committee.
RTE has been engulfed in crisis after it was revealed last week that it had under-reported Tubridy’s salary by a total of 345,000 (£298,000) euro over the period 2017 to 2022.
A number of RTE executives and board members appeared before Oireachtas committees to answer questions about the controversy on Wednesday and Thursday.
Speaking in Brussels, Mr Varadkar said the Government was “trying to get to the bottom of what happened with these unusual clandestine payments in RTE”.
They may have a story to tell, I think it is right they should be allowed to tell their side of the story— Leo Varadkar
He added: “RTE executives and board members have come before an Oireachtas committee to answer questions, but there are other people who could shine a light on this.
“They include Ryan Tubridy, they include his agent (Noel Kelly), they include Dee Forbes and I still think that they should be willing to come before the committee and answer questions.
“There are procedures, they will be treated fairly and I think that would be the right thing to do from their part.
“They may have a story to tell, I think it is right they should be allowed to tell their side of the story.
“The fact that they wouldn’t, or would refuse to, would be of more concern to me.”
The Taoiseach said the public in Ireland want “full and frank” answers from RTE bosses about the row.
He said: “The most important thing RTE has to do is win back the confidence of the public and the licence payers.
“I think the most important thing they can do today is to make sure that they give full and frank answers, full and frank information to the joint Oireachtas committee.
“That is really what people need to see.”
Mr Varadkar added: “In terms of the Government’s external review, I spoke to Minister (Catherine) Martin last night, she is working on the terms of reference, is approaching a potential person who would head that up and hopefully will be in a position to sign off on that tomorrow or early next week.”
The Taoiseach also said that work around reforming the TV licence in Ireland would have to resume, but stressed this was a separate issue from the controversy surrounding RTE.
He said: “There is an issue here with payments to certain people in RTE, we need transparency around that, we need to know the facts and then there needs to be accountability once we know all the facts.
“Funding is a separate issue and we do need to fund public service broadcasting, it is not just about RTE.
“We suspended our work on the reform of the TV licence but we will need to resume that because public service broadcasting is important.
“I don’t like the alternative, which is not having properly-funded public-sector broadcasting.
“We need a collection mechanism which is modern, that is efficient and we also need to make sure that the money is distributed more fairly, that it doesn’t all go to RTE.”
