RTÉ has hocked the licence-payers' silver trying to turn Gerry Ryan into a genuine star. So it's hard to blame anyone but the national broadcaster when he behaves like a self-obsessed diva and refuses to take a pay cut.

The station kept faith with him two decades ago when he spun a yarn on the Gay Byrne Show about skinning and eating an unsuspecting lamb found gambolling in the wilds of Connemara. It was a salivatingly entertaining saga. Except it never happened. Most people would expect that peddling lies would be career suicide for someone whose sole function is to converse with the nation, but RTÉ absolved him. Now he gets paid more than Barack Obama.

Judging by his Donald Trumpish musings about his sybaritic lifestyle in his €100,000-advance autobiography, Would the Real Gerry Ryan Please Stand Up, he is paid far too much for his own good – ("My canteen is the Four Seasons". "My favourite sommelier is Paschal from Dromoland".) His current four-year contract adds up to more than €2m. Good going for a broadcaster not blessed with a face for television, despite the numerous vehicles RTÉ has commissioned for his promotion over the years.

If he actually possessed the rare talent implied by his lavish remuneration and his employer's investment in him, he would have been snapped up by some richer foreign broadcaster when he presented the Riverdance Eurovision to an audience of 200 million people. Wielding the threat of headhunters from the BBC or America is a time-honoured negotiation ploy for extracting overly-generous contracts from Montrose, though the world's great broadcasting corporations come calling less often than Martians. Ryan was back at his Donnybrook turntable after his Eurovision stint, talking to the nation with his trademark gratuitous coarseness enjoyed by 400,000 listeners.

His worth to RTÉ is calculated according to the advertising spend on his show. This is a skewed science as it does not allow for direct comparisons with the pulling power of any other broadcaster given the opportunity to occupy the same prime slot and enjoying a relationship with the audience established over decades of familiarity. In its own interests, RTÉ has given Ryan socks to maximise his market­ability. The TV station even got Ryan Tubridy to interview Gerry on his own show, Ryan Confi­dential to plug his auto­biography. Hard cash has been supple­mented by shameless nepotism in the Gerry-You're- A-Star campaign.

It is demoralising to see Tubridy align himself with Ryan in the stand-off with RTÉ. Tubridy is now equipped with his own €100,000-advance book deal and until last night was refusing to sacrifice a cent of his €346,000 salary for his five-days-a-week radio programme and Saturday night tv chat show. He had cited legal reasons as the impediment to any diminu­tion in his circumstances and made a donation to charity.

Dark mutterings have been emanating from Montrose about not renewing certain presenters' contracts when they expire, but listeners who disapprove of Ryan's selfish obduracy in a national crisis do not have to wait that long.

They can switch off the radio now.

Ryan has cheer-led the excesses of the Celtic Tiger bling which is now dead and buried. Official Ireland is slowly waking up to public demands for ethical conduct and dealing with the transgressions of the banks in slow motion. But, when it comes to RTÉ's relics of the money-is-god past, the people hold the power. One turn of the radio dial and the broadcasters' oxygen is shut off. Diminishing audiences equal diminishing advertising. And stars are rendered invisible in the cold light of day.

jmccarthy@tribune.ie