Calls for RTÉ to clarify recruitment of ex-Newstalk hosts Ger Gilroy and Kieran Cuddihy

RTÉ’s director of audio Patricia Monahan has been asked to clarify how former Newstalk sports presenter Ger Gilroy was recently hired by the station. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has also called for clarification about how current Liveline presenter Kieran Cuddihy was recruited.It has explicitly asked if Cuddihy, who is also a former Newstalk employee, was effectively headhunted by the national broadcaster or applied through an established expression-of-interest process as had been previously suggested. It was later clarified in the Oireachtas media committee on Wednesday that Cuddihy applied via an expressions-of-interest process.READ MORELast month Monahan – who herself joined the national broadcaster from Newstalk – claimed in a newspaper interview that RTÉ had run “an expressions-of-interest process, and obviously Gerard expressed an interest, and we decided he was the one who came through the process and was appointed”.It subsequently emerged, however, in an interview with Gilroy in The Irish Times that rather than Gilroy expressing an interest in joining the station, RTÉ’s head of podcasts, Hugh Ormond, had “pitched a daily sports podcast” to the former Off the Ball presenter which prompted him to leave Newstalk. Gilroy and Ormond first met as student journalists at Trinity College.[ Podcaster Ger Gilroy on moving to RTÉ, his upstart attitude and starting over: ‘Your job is to win, right?’Opens in new window ]In a letter to RTÉ’s chief people officer, Annette Malone, the head of the NUJ, Séamus Dooley, said it was “a matter of utmost seriousness” regarding “the nature of the appointment”.Dooley said such an approach was contrary to “procedures and agreements on recruitment” and he said it indicated that “the culture of secrecy and private deals still prevails”.He told the station’s head of HR that the “promises of a reformed public service broadcaster ring hollow when employees learn of backdoor recruitment of this type for full-time staff jobs still apply”.He noted that the director general Kevin Bakhurst said last week that Gilroy would be among the top 20 highest earners in RTÉ and said there was “currently no agreed rate or scale for podcast hosts”.Dooley said the “circumstances of Mr Gilroy’s appointment, the misleading narrative presented and the salary level negotiated for a staff job serve to undermine trust among staff and in RTÉ. Despite assurances, the absence of transparency surrounding appointments remains a problem for the organisation.”He pointed out that it was “the second such external appointment, following on from the appointment of Kieran Cuddihy as the presenter of Liveline. Ms Monahan stated at the time that Mr Cuddihy was hired after he applied through the expression-of-interest process.”Dooley called for clarification over Cuddihy’s appointment and if he “applied to RTÉ or was also recruited from Newstalk in the same manner as Mr Gilroy”.He concluded by suggesting the revelations about the manner of Gilroy’s appointment “were extremely damaging to RTÉ and in particular to staff morale”.RTÉ has been contacted for comment. Appearing before the Oireachtas media committee on Wednesday afternoon, Monahan said people had been asked to express an interest in sport presenting. “Anybody who applied for that was considered for the daily sports podcast role. In addition to that, we ran an internal expressions of interest for the role specifically because we wanted to give internal staff an opportunity to apply,” said Monahan.“But the expressions of interest is only part of how we recruit. It’s only part of the process of how we recruit presenters, and there is a phase in that process where we consider other candidates who may not have applied for some reason.”She told the hearing: “That was the point at which Ger entered the process. But he was assessed on the same basis as everybody else. There was a clear, transparent process around it.”She said he “was approached to see would he be interested in a process ... He was assessed against the criteria that everybody else was assessed, so there was a clear process.”“Expression of interest was never an exclusive way by which we were going to recruit presenters, and it has never been that that way. We introduced expressions of interest after the EAC recommendations in order to facilitate a broader access to those processes,” said Monahan, referring to the acronym for the broadcaster’s executive advisory committee. “But it was never going to be the exclusive way in which we recruit presenters.”