Ger Gilroy, the sports podcast and RTÉ’s Oireachtas mess: ‘People are absolutely livid’

Friday in RTÉ started with a bomb threat and didn’t get much better from there. David McCullagh’s morning radio show went off air at 9.01am for over an hour as the various buildings on the RTÉ campus were evacuated, leading to him having to broadcast from the Roadcaster, the station’s mobile studio, in the car park.In his haste to leave the building, he had left his jumper behind and did the rest of his show in a T-shirt. When his guest, the Labour MEP Aodhán Ó Riordan, noted McCullagh in his less-than-autumnal attire, he couldn’t resist the flash of a topical dagger. “You look cold, David. We might get Ger Gilroy to give you a tracksuit top or something ... ”It has been a long week in the national broadcaster. It went in front of the Oireachtas media committee on Wednesday, ostensibly to, in the words of the committee’s own press release, “examine the broadcaster’s progress on reform, its funding position and its plans for organisational transformation”. It ended up tying itself in knots over a sports podcast. Tracksuit tops are the new flip-flops.This article is the result of conversations and interactions with more than a dozen RTÉ employees, both inside and outside the sports department. Before this week, it was relatively common knowledge in media circles that there were misgivings within RTÉ surrounding Gilroy’s new podcast Howler. Not for the first time, the performance of RTÉ executives at an Oireachtas hearing has caused canteen-gossip misgivings to curdle into outright fury within the ranks.READ MORE“It’s a Mickey Mouse topic,” says one insider. “A sports podcast isn’t the be-all and end-all. But the problem is it’s always a Mickey Mouse topic. It’s the Mickey Mouse stuff that’s bringing us down.”A decent gauge of the depth of feeling in Montrose is the fact that the RTÉ chapel of the NUJ went ahead with a union meeting on Friday, despite the campus having earlier been cleared for the bomb scare. It was a hybrid meeting, lasting around 90 minutes, and was attended by RTÉ staff across various departments, rather than solely sport.The general tone was anger at the latest appearance before the Oireachtas, specifically regarding the lack of transparency around Gilroy’s hiring process. Members from other departments expressed solidarity for their colleagues in sport, and some staff complained about the size of the budget apportioned to the podcast department while pointing to a lack of resourcing for the radio programmes on which they work.Gardaí at RTÉ on Friday after the broadcaster received a bomb threat. Photograph: Sam Boal/Collins It was also noted that the Howler podcast has been getting two or three high-value promotional slots on radio each day, most notably during Morning Ireland and Drivetime, at the expense of other radio shows. One source said there was a sense of cohesion among staff members by the end of the meeting, saying RTÉ management had managed to unite people who hadn’t been speaking to each other.Emma O Kelly, chair of the union branch and RTÉ’s education correspondent, says staff at the meeting expressed “seething anger” at the appointment and related issues. “There’s a sense that a line has been crossed by RTÉ management and a determination to have our concerns addressed,” she said. [ Calls for RTÉ to clarify recruitment of ex-Newstalk hosts Ger Gilroy and Kieran CuddihyOpens in new window ]Broadly, the anger falls into two separate categories. While some of it is aimed at Gilroy himself, the more visceral end of it focuses on the higher-ups in RTÉ for bringing the station into the public eye again with accusations of waste, overspending and secret deals. Any Oireachtas appearance that ends up as fodder for a Gift Grub sketch is never good news.On a very basic level, some members of the sports department feel misrepresented by what was said at the Oireachtas committee. Deputy director general Adrian Lynch provided a neat headline by saying that “the RTÉ sports department were actually not happy with the appointment of Ger Gilroy because of comments he has made about RTÉ Sport in the past”.Yet the sports department was never canvassed, never asked its opinion and never involved in any way. The sports editor, Declan McBennett, was told Gilroy would head the new podcast four days before it was announced. The wider sports department was given 10 minutes’ notice on the day the press release went out.“It’s not that Ger slagged RTÉ off,” says one sports department source. “Most people have slagged RTÉ off at some point. If RTÉ management who are involved in this decision think hiring a 49-year-old and putting him in a tracksuit top will appeal to a young audience, it says a lot about the editorial judgment of management ... I slag RTÉ off and I work for them. We are well able to slag off RTÉ ourselves.” That said, it is no secret that there has been occasional enmity between the RTÉ sports department and Gilroy going way back. Though he has long been associated with Newstalk, where he revolutionised Irish sports radio from a standing start at the beginning of the century, this is far from Gilroy’s first time working for RTÉ.Ger Gilroy has been a consistent critic of RTÉ's sports output. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times He fronted the GAA magazine show Park Live in the mid-2000s and was part of a well-funded but ill-fated World Cup travelogue series called Gatecrasher around the tournament in Germany in 2006. In later years, however, he has in his roles in Newstalk and Off the Ball been a consistent critic of the sports output on RTÉ.“People are fuming,” says a long-standing staffer. “People are absolutely livid. Not because of somebody getting a job. We’re in a competitive environment and these things happen all the time. We’ve seen people come, we’ve seen people go.“But given what he has said about us over the past 20 years, how he has criticised the coverage of various sports, it’s a lot to take that he is just brought in like this. He has advocated for years for the licence fee to be dispersed in different directions – and now he’s in the situation where the very same licence fee is covering his salary and covering the costs associated with this podcast. Does he feel in any way awkward about that?”Of course, none of that is why Kevin Bakhurst and head of audio Patricia Monahan were squirming down in the catacombs of Kildare Street on Wednesday. Back-room bitching about a new hire is the oil in the engines of workplaces the world over. “The story isn’t really about Ger at all,” says one person in the sports department. “It’s about the process of appointing him. There has been no culture change. Not only have they seemingly done another secret deal and [conducted] another secret process, they have shown us up and misrepresented us in public.”That’s the nub of it. The stain of the Tubridy scandals has never truly been washed out of RTÉ’s clothes. Ger Gilroy was a high-profile hire and when Monahan, Lynch and Bakhurst were explaining the circumstances around it on Wednesday, they prevaricated and obfuscated just enough for the politicians to smell blood.So much so that when Lynch, in response to repeated questions about a clothing allowance, finally conceded that it could “potentially” have been a tracksuit top for a photo shoot that money was spent on, the headlines wrote themselves. The idea that a tracksuit top is some sort of extravagance is obviously a nonsense – but when you’re giving cagey, wishy-washy answers to an Oireachtas committee, it hints at a bigger problem.Broadcasts continue in the RTÉ Roadcaster at Montrose on Friday following a bomb threat. Photograph: Sam Boal/Collins That problem, of course, is RTÉ waste. The whole reason it was in front of the committee in the first place was to give an update on how it is making itself more financially viable. The issues around the Howler podcast began as a tangent but ended up becoming the main event, a kind of totem for the organisation’s inability to change.For one thing, staff want to know why it was deemed necessary to go outside of RTÉ in the first place. The RTÉ sports department is made up of about 60 staff. Not all of them are presenters but some of them are.“You have a lot of very, very good people that are floating around the office now looking for something to do,” says one staff member. “People can argue the toss about Marie Crowe or Jacqui Hurley or Shane Dawson or Clare MacNamara or Paul O’Flynn or Joe Stack or Darren Frehill or Damien O’Meara or any of those.“People can argue the toss about whether or not they are better, worse, good, bad or indifferent in comparison to Ger Gilroy. That’s a subjective conversation. But the reality is all these people are sitting around the department looking for something to do.“You have a lot of people on the books already yet they went off and got someone in to do a podcast on whatever salary he’s on when we’re supposed to be cutting back. Most people believe that if you put the kind of resources that are being put into this podcast now, there’s absolutely no reason to say that you wouldn’t post the kinds of numbers that it is going to get anyway.”[ Podcaster Ger Gilroy on moving to RTÉ, his upstart attitude and starting over: ‘Your job is to win, right?’Opens in new window ]Or, as one other source puts it: “In RTÉ Sport, you have about five or six buses. You have The Sunday Game at night, The Sunday Game live, you have soccer and rugby – although we hardly do any rugby any more. You have Saturday Sport and Sunday Sport on the radio and Inside Sport every evening.“So five or six buses, maybe seven. And you have about 18 to 20 bus drivers. But then out of the blue, when costs are being cut all over the shop, this new one comes along and it costs a fortune.”None of which is Ger Gilroy’s fault. The opportunity came up, he was contacted to see would he be interested and not even the RTÉ staffers who are annoyed at the things he said about their work down the years think he did anything wrong by taking it on. Some – not many, but some – even have a grudging respect for his willingness to make a go of it despite knowing how unpopular the move would be among the rank and file.20/10/2026 - News - Sports presenter Ger Gilroy. Photograph Nick Bradshaw / The Irish Times But towards the executives who made the call on it, the general view is outrage. There is a feeling that this was a stitch-up job between former Newstalk colleagues. There is also the basic day-to-day problem that the sports staff feels Howler is cannibalising existing RTÉ output, fishing in the same shallow pool for guests. The offhand manner in which the gender-balance aspect has been handled has infuriated many as well.“They’ve painted themselves into a corner,” says one source. “They’ve said that there’s going to be a women’s sports podcast. So now they have to follow through on that. And do they pay their women’s podcast presenter less money? They can’t do that.”Another source who works on current affairs said the lack of female representation on the show was “diabolical”, as it is against the “ethos of gender balance” expected of RTÉ’s radio shows. Maybe worst of all for RTÉ is the fact that there is no neat and tidy way to get this off the news agenda. Howler has just finished its third week on air and it is comfortably the highest-ranked RTÉ podcast in the sporting charts. But the staff are still outraged over the way it was all done and Lynch confirmed on Friday that RTÉ will be up in front of the Public Accounts Committee before the end of the month.Like any good sports podcast, there are plenty of remaining episodes to get your teeth into yet.