Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan is due to meet RTÉ’s director general Kevin Bakhurst, chairman Terence O’Rourke and other officials from the State broadcaster next Tuesday to discuss payments made to a number of presenters.
The State broadcaster is embroiled in fresh controversy after it emerged RTÉ paid almost €100,000 in total to Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy after they left their roles at Radio 1 last year.
RTÉ also updated it highest-paid presenters lists for 2024 and 2025 after it reclassified Derek Mooney as a presenter, rather than a producer.
Byrne topped the highest-paid presenters list in 2025 on €280,000, while D’Arcy was in fifth place on €219,992.
Mooney is eighth on the updated 2024 list with a salary of €197,151. On the 2025 list, he moved up one place to seventh with a salary of more than €202,000.
Mooney presents the one-hour wildlife show Mooney Goes Wild at 10pm on Mondays on RTÉ Radio 1.
RTÉ broadcaster Derek Mooney
Speaking on Friday morning, Bakhurst said Mooney is best known as a presenter but the “majority of his work is as an executive producer”.
On Friday afternoon, O’Donovan said RTÉ had questions to answer, particularly after being granted State funding worth €725 million over three years in 2024.
“Here we are yet again, Groundhog Day, explaining something that, to be quite honest about, I thought after giving the company three quarters of a billion euro, that we had moved on from that, and that we had moved to a position where there was full disclosure, and we get this information yesterday,” O’Donovan told RTÉ Radio’s News at One.
O’Donovan said he became aware of the situation on Thursday afternoon when Prime Time contacted his department seeking a comment. The Minister said he “immediately sought” to speak with O’Rourke and the pair held a virtual meeting on Thursday night.
Regarding Mooney being designated as a producer by RTÉ from 2020 to 2024, O’Donovan said: “A very logical question that I asked the chairman last night is, how could Derek Mooney have been regarded as anything other than a presenter?
[ RTÉ confirms Derek Mooney’s pay was incorrectly listed in public recordsOpens in new window ]
“He was a presenter, he is a presenter, he is obviously a presenter. It’s like a duck – if it walks and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. But for some reason, unbeknownst to the current chairman, he was re-categorised. Now, why that happened, I don’t know.”
O’Donovan said the latest revelations will further damage public trust in RTÉ at a time when he is “trying to get people to buy a television licence”.
He continued: “We have been down this road far too many times, and if we want people to go into their post office and buy their television licence, I think the least that they need to know is who is being paid what in their totality in RTÉ.”
In a statement read out on the News at One, RTÉ said it planned to release further details about Mooney’s salary in recent years.
Byrne and D’Arcy both left RTÉ in October, later moving to Newstalk and starting a podcast respectively.
Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy. Photographs: Conor McCabe/Newstalk & Alan Betson
Byrne ceased providing services to RTÉ on October 31st but her company Derrough Media Limited was paid €47,000 for the last two months of the year.
D’Arcy ceased providing services on October 9th but his company Whatnext Productions Limited was paid €50,000 after that date.
Speaking on Morning Ireland on Friday, Bakhurst defended the decision to pay both presenters after they stopped working at the broadcaster, saying it was “totally the right decision”. He said presenters, “although they’re are paid a lot of money, they also have contracts”.
He said: “People have notice periods, and you have to abide by that … If we hadn’t, by the way, and we got into a legal fight, it would have cost us a shedload more money than it did.”
Bakhurst said Byrne had offered to stay until the end of her contract but RTÉ asked her to leave early so it could launch the new Radio 1 schedule.
He said both presenters “were available to work until [the end of their contracts], but we took a decision, we wanted to launch the new schedule”.
Speaking on her Newstalk programme on Friday, Byrne said she resigned from RTÉ last summer and her contract ran until the end of 2025.
“I made it clear, I was happy to stay on and work there until the end of my contract,” she said.
“But RTÉ came to me and told me that they wanted me to finish up at the end of October. That was their right and their decision. So that’s how that happened, from my perspective.”
When it was announced last October that D’Arcy was leaving the State broadcaster, the presenter said he was “blindsided” – something disputed by RTÉ’s director of audio Patricia Monahan.
The Irish Times has contacted RTÉ, D’Arcy and Mooney for comment.
During the Morning Ireland interview, Bakhurst defended both the decision to classify Mooney as a producer six years ago and the decision this week to reclassify him.
Bakhurst said no one on RTÉ’s current leadership team was involved in the decision to reclassify Mooney in 2020. He said RTÉ recently sought independent legal advice about the matter and was told the decision was “a perfectly rational decision to take at the time”.
The director general said: “That [decision] was made some time ago by people not there any more but we actually took independent legal advice when the issue arose in the last few weeks about the decision that was taken in 2020, and the legal advice was it was a perfectly justifiable decision given that Derek’s contract is as executive producer, but we take a different view.”
Bakhurst said “someone in finance” at RTÉ raised the question in recent weeks as to whether Mooney was “correctly classified”.
The director general said Mooney has “been a member of staff for nearly three decades with RTÉ, and he’s actually been on a radio producer [contract] and then an executive producer contract with RTÉ for a couple of decades now”.
After reviewing the situation, Bakhurst said the current executive team made the decision to reclassify Mooney as a presenter, as part of “efforts to be transparent and as thorough as possible”.
During the interview, Sarah McInerney said the maximum salary for a producer on the RTÉ pay scale in 2021 was €90,000, meaning the majority of Mooney’s salary “must have still been coming from his presenting role”.
In response, Bakhurst said Mooney’s roles at the broadcaster “changed over the years” and “when people’s roles change, quite often their salaries change with them”.
In 2020, RTÉ implemented a 15 per cent pay reduction for its highest-earning presenters as part of a restructuring plan. McInerney asked if the decision to reclassify Mooney as a producer was a “side deal” to avoid cutting his salary.
Bakhurst said that was “a very unfair gloss to put on [Mooney]”, adding: “I don’t think he got a pay cut but he was on the staff salary he was on, and he was on an executive producer role already by that stage.”
Bakhurst said Mooney was informed of RTÉ’s decision to reclassify him as a presenter but he “played no role in this”.
“We told him this was happening, and he agreed that that was our decision, but he’s played no role in this at all. You know, he’s just carrying on with his work.”
TDs and Senators will have an opportunity to question RTÉ on the matter next week as representatives of the broadcaster were already scheduled to appear at the Oireachtas Committee on Media to discuss issues related to funding and pensions.
Committee chairman, Labour TD Alan Kelly, said a number of questions arose on the reclassification of Mooney’s pay, including why it “wasn’t brought to the fore” in 2023 when RTÉ was facing scrutiny over other payments.