Kieran Cuddihy’s appearance on Friday night’s Late Late Show has been cancelled after RTÉ received legal correspondence from Newstalk warning that the presenter remained under contract with the radio station.
Newstalk also sent a legal letter to Mr Cuddihy noting his contractual obligations to the station meant he would be unable to appear on tonight’s show.
“Kieran Cuddihy is unable to be a guest on The Late Late Show to be broadcast tonight,” an RTÉ spokeswoman said without elaborating as to the reason for the change in plan.
A spokeswoman for Newstalk said: “In response to promotional material published for tonight’s Late Late Show, Newstalk / Bauer Media has contacted RTÉ to make them aware of contractual obligations that remain in force.”
RTÉ confirmed on Friday morning that Mr Cuddihy will be the new presenter of Liveline just hours after Newstalk management had emailed staff to confirm the presenter of the station’s Hard Shoulder programme was leaving with immediate effect.
[ Mick Heaney on RTÉ’s new scheduleOpens in new window ]
Mr Cuddihy will also no longer present The Tonight Show on Virgin Media Television after he works out his notice period.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1 on Friday, Patricia Monahan, the broadcaster’s director of audio, said Mr Cuddihy was one of more than 500 people who applied to succeed Joe Duffy as Liveline host.
“Kieran applied like everybody else, and went through a very robust process that we ran in Radio 1,” Ms Monahan said. “It was less a decision to go outside [of RTÉ] than to identify the right candidate for the job, as far as we were concerned.”
A radical RTÉ Radio 1 schedule shake-up was confirmed less than 24 hours after the announcement of presenter Ray D’Arcy’s departure from the national broadcaster.
On Thursday, Mr D’Arcy, who had presented The Ray D’Arcy Show on Radio 1 since February 2015, said he was “hugely disappointed” with how RTÉ management handled the situation.
Ms Monahan said “with change of this scale, there are always difficult conversations to be had, and that’s never easy for anybody”.
She said she would have had “no problem” with Mr D’Arcy saying goodbye on air, but “different people choose to deal with that in different ways”.