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E-mailCathal Goan's seven-year tenure as director general of RTÉ comes to an end as he steps down from his €320,000-a-year post.
Yes, that's correct, his €320,000-a-year post. Plus expenses.
RTÉ has benefitted greatly from Goan's steady hand. The national broadcaster's reputation as a trustworthy and professional news provider has been strengthened as the country has increasingly turned to its current-affairs programmes for information about the political and economic turmoil of the last two years.
Goan's genuine support for the arts and music and the Irish language has brought a diversity and intelligence to programming which deserves recognition.
The only real controversy it has had to face has been the extraordinarily generous fees it pays its 'stars'. These were cut last year. But given the state of the national finances, RTÉ cannot expect any licence-fee increase for the foreseeable future.
The first thing the new director general could do, just as the new HSE head Cathal Magee has accepted, would be to take a cut in pay. After all, not even the head of RTÉ deserves to be paid almost €100,000 more than the Taoiseach.
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Quite right. Could'nt agree more. RTE is the biggest gravy train in the country. In the last decade it's been hijacked by a clique of so called "celebs" who think they are working in Hollywood and have such an inflated but delusional opinion of themselves that most of the budget now goes on their salaries rather than programming, with the result that the raison d'etre of this station i.e. presenting a cultural identity of Ireland is lost, and all we have now is the cultural identity of the Dublin 4 house makeover middle class or the ignorant eating habits of fat people killing themselves. Fashion is of paramount importance, appearance is everything with this incestuous crew of overpaid, shallow suburbanites who seem to think that making it onto the cover of the RTE guide is akin to Vanity Fair. The acme of this delusional mindset resulted in Pat Kenny getting paid almost a million euros a year, in spite of the fact that 99% of the country thought he was unsuitable for the job of hosting The Late Late Show.
RTE uses the Government to extort the license fee from unwilling subscribers with the threat of imprisonment, but the biggest scandal of all is that coinciding with health and welfare cutbacks affecting the poor and the elderly being implemented with vigour by the government, the same station RTE is still sucking 60 million a year from the Department of Social Welfare to boost the incomes of it's "stars". This corporation needs to be brought back to earth and it's employees need to be reminded that this society is suffering financially everywhere, and the taxpayers cannot afford to subsidise their lifestyles any longer.