'No incentive to be more transparent’ was how RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst lamented the public and political backlash, after yet another ‘payments to talent’ controversy erupted earlier this year.

At the time, he was complaining about getting a roasting over the ‘misclassification’ of broadcaster Derek Mooney as a producer, which meant Mooney’s generous six-figure salary didn’t feature in the annual Top Ten list of highest-paid stars.

Then again, we could all say the same about another ongoing RTÉ saga: the Dee Forbes Affair. 

As it now appears that the former DG has successfully dodged any accountability for the various scandals that emerged during her tenure, and is free to enjoy the sunshine in glorious Glandore without a thought for Oireachtas committees, licence fees or an indignant public, that’s the burning question: where is the incentive for transparency in the station’s dealings with the public who fund it?

The real incentive for transparency should be the swingeing consequences of failure.

But where are the consequences for failing to explain governance errors, financial profligacy and bizarre judgement calls? 

When the head of a semi-State body, who had been on a package of over €300,000, can apparently just produce a sick cert and walk away from a slew of unanswered questions regarding her stewardship, why would any such executive bother to account for themselves again?

If an Oireachtas committee is prepared to accept a ‘talk to the hand’ brush-off – Ms Forbes has even refused to give a written statement to politicians since the payments scandal broke in 2023 – what’s to stop the next embattled bigwig doing the same?

In the three years since Dee Forbes disappeared into the West Cork sunset, departing abruptly the moment the barter accounts, top-up payments and corporate junkets came to light, there is little evidence that anything much has changed in the station.

They’re still paying the massive six-figure salaries, even though now the most generously rewarded are the ‘suits’ rather than the stars. 

And, as the Derek Mooney revelations proved, they’ve still to be dragged kicking and screaming to anything approaching candour, let alone proactively investigating, uncovering and voluntarily addressing the embedded practices and guileful instincts that have so soured the public towards RTÉ.

And that’s all the more ironic coming from a once-trusted organisation that still acts as if it is a positive paragon of journalistic accountability, transparency and integrity.

It was Ms Forbes herself, as DG in 2020, who signed off on new journalism guidelines ‘designed to protect our editorial independence and public trust’.

The station’s journalism, it pledged, would be ‘honest, reliable, authoritative, accurate, impartial, fair and independent of vested interests’ – nobody and no institution, therefore, would be above question.

But where were those intrepid questioners when the DG was spending public money like a Russian oligarch in Harrods? Where were the hard questions when Toy Show The Musical collapsed in expensive flames?

Where were the fearless watchdogs when RTÉ presenters were openly using the station’s facilities to promote their side-hustles?

Here’s Mandatory Obligation No. 3 from these high-minded guidelines: ‘RTÉ presenters must not promote commercial ventures with which they are associated or from which they stand to gain financially.’

Did nobody notice Doireann Garrihy flogging porridge in a social media endorsement filmed inside an RTÉ radio studio, or Lottie Ryan making an electric car ad in the station’s car park? Did anyone bother to read these guidelines at all?

It is difficult to identify any serious effort by RTÉ, over the past three years, to earn back the public trust that was incinerated in the implosion of Dee Forbes’s reign. 

Witness the decision to send 41 people, at a cost of €57,000, to cover Ireland’s World Cup qualifying match in Czechia last March.

At the weekend, Kevin Bakhurst furiously denied a claim by Fine Gael TD James Geoghegan that ‘RTÉ are going backwards on key reform targets’ despite those changes being a condition of the €725million taxpayer-funded bailout. 

The deputy’s claims that ‘personnel-related operating costs’ have continued to rise, regardless of a commitment to reduce them, were dismissed as ‘inaccurate’ by the current DG. But sending 41 people to cover a soccer match doesn’t look much like belt-tightening.

And Ms Forbes herself remains key to resetting the public’s relationship with the organisation she once headed. If she reckoned that lying low in West Cork, and having her partner tell enquiring journalists to ‘f*** off’, would eventually result in her name and her role being quietly forgotten, she was wrong.

The Oireachtas committee members may have given up on ever getting her to appear, or even to do them the courtesy of dictating a statement, but you’ve only got to look at social media whenever the latest RTÉ controversy arises to realise that the public have no intention of letting this go.

And those pictures of her, apparently carefree and enjoying the fare at a gastropub in Glandore while still being too ill to engage with the committee, have fuelled a fresh outburst of public anger, mistrust and resentment. 

Calls for her cooperation came from politicians across the House following the publication of the Mail’s pictures, but in reality they can do little more than invoke old-fashioned concepts of honour and decency.

Bakhurst is right – there is no incentive for RTÉ’s current or former bosses to be transparent, and no consequences for obfuscation, recalcitrance or arrogance. 

The trouble is that they’re not the only ones who require a nudge to do the right thing.

A very large percentage of the TV-owning public also need an incentive to start paying the licence fee again.

But as long as people feel they’re being played for fools, that’s not going to happen.

THERE was a mad fashion trend about a decade ago where young women wore fleecy Penneys pyjamas as outdoor clothing, strolling about in their PJs to take kids to school or do the shopping.

The fad for nightwear as daywear seems to have abated but, thanks to A-listers such as Zoe Kravitz and Margot Robbie, an even more alarming version may be about to hit our streets – underwear as daywear. Barbie actress Margot was pictured shopping in Paris recently wearing a silk vest and old-fashioned half-slip – the kind your granny wore under her Sunday gúna – as a top and skirt, with the ensemble costing almost €800.

It gave me a pang of anxiety, as it felt like one of those dreams where you suddenly realise you’ve forgotten to get dressed.

Still, I guess shopping in your undies makes changing rooms a breeze.

I’VE never been a fan of airline window seats. As a nervous flier, I find if I don’t look out the window, the plane tends to stay in the air.

However, the experience of the Ryanair passenger who was almost sucked out of his seat when the window shattered has finished me entirely.

Ryanair routinely assigns the middle seat as a punishment if you refuse to pay extra to reserve a seat, but now that spot seems the safest place to be; you won’t be whacked by passing rucksacks or sucked to your doom if a window blows out.

And what’s the deal with Row 11? The Ryanair passenger was in 11F, and yet the Air India passenger who alone survived the crash in Gujarat in 2025 was seated at the other window on that same row, 11A. 

Lucky for some – is this the new Row 13?

Even the sceptics will have to admit there might, after all, have been something to the famous ‘Mayo curse’, following Sunday’s historic All-Ireland result in Croke Park. 

Coming from Kilkenny, it’s difficult to imagine the joy in a county where even the most elderly citizens struggle to recall an All-Ireland win. And it was hard to blame those who began to suspect the curse, supposedly placed on the team by a priest who felt a funeral had been disrespected during homecoming celebrations in 1951, was real. 

Because whatever the explanation, Mayo did not win another title in the lifetime of the members of that 1951 team, as the priest had decreed. 

Was it truly a hex, or just a psychological barrier that sapped the confidence of the team while it endured? It’s a strange one, for sure.