RTÉ defends paying Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy almost €100k in total after they left broadcaster

RTÉ’s director general Kevin Bakhurst has defended the State broadcaster’s decision to pay Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy almost €100,000 after the pair stopped presenting their shows on Radio 1 late last year.Byrne topped the highest-paid presenters list in 2025 on €280,000, while D’Arcy was in fifth place on €219,992.Byrne and D’Arcy both left RTÉ in October, later moving to Newstalk and starting a podcast respectively. Byrne ceased providing services to RTÉ on October 31st but her company Derrough Media Limited was paid €47,000 for the last two months of the year.READ MORED’Arcy ceased providing services on October 9th but his company Whatnext Productions Limited was paid €50,000 after that date.Bakhurst defended the decision to pay both presenters after they stopped working at the broadcaster, saying it was “totally the right decision”. He said presenters, “although they’re are paid a lot of money, they also have contracts”.He said: “People have notice periods, and you have to abide by that ... If we hadn’t, by the way, and we got into a legal fight, it would have cost us a shedload more money than it did.”Bakhurst said Byrne had offered to stay until the end of her contract but RTÉ asked her to leave early so it could launch the new Radio 1 schedule. He said both presenters “were available to work until [the end of their contracts], but we took a decision, we wanted to launch the new schedule”.Speaking on her Newstalk programme on Friday, Byrne said she resigned from RTÉ last summer and her contract ran until the end of 2025.“I made it clear, I was happy to stay on and work there until the end of my contract,” she said.“But RTÉ came to me and told me that they wanted me to finish up at the end of October. That was their right and their decision. So that’s how that happened, from my perspective.”When it was announced last October that D’Arcy was leaving the State broadcaster, the presenter said he was “blindsided” – something disputed by RTÉ’s director of audio Patricia Monahan.The Irish Times has contacted D’Arcy for comment. The news that Byrne and D’Arcy continued to be paid after they left RTÉ was confirmed on Thursday, as part of a longer statement from the broadcaster detailing revisions to the highest-paid presenters lists for 2024 and 2025. [ RTÉ confirms Derek Mooney’s pay was incorrectly listed in public recordsOpens in new window ]RTÉ broadcaster Derek Mooney RTÉ confirmed Derek Mooney was now included on the list for both years after the national broadcaster reclassified him as a presenter, instead of a producer.Mooney is eighth on the updated 2024 list with a salary of €197,151. On the 2025 list, he moved up one place to seventh with a salary of just more than €202,000. Mooney had been designated as a producer from 2020 to 2024. During the Morning Ireland interview on Friday, Bakhurst defended both the decision to classify Mooney as a producer six years ago and the decision this week to reclassify him. Bakhurst said no one on RTÉ’s current leadership team was involved in the decision to reclassify Mooney in 2020. He said RTÉ recently sought independent legal advice about the matter and was told the decision was “a perfectly rational decision to take at the time”.The director general said: “That [decision] was made some time ago by people not there any more but we actually took independent legal advice when the issue arose in the last few weeks about the decision that was taken in 2020, and the legal advice was it was a perfectly justifiable decision given that Derek’s contract is as executive producer, but we take a different view.”Bakhurst said “someone in finance” at RTÉ raised the question in recent weeks as to whether Mooney was “correctly classified”. Bakhurst said Mooney is best known as a presenter but the “majority of his work is as an executive producer”. The director general said Mooney has “been a member of staff for nearly three decades with RTÉ, and he’s actually been on a radio producer [contract] and then an executive producer contract with RTÉ for a couple of decades now”.After reviewing the situation, Bakhurst said the current executive team made the decision to reclassify Mooney as a presenter, as part of “efforts to be transparent and as thorough as possible”.During the interview, Sarah McInerney said the maximum salary for a producer on the RTÉ pay scale in 2021 was €90,000, meaning the majority of Mooney’s salary “must have still been coming from his presenting role”.[ Sarah McInerney: When I told my manager I was pregnant he said, ‘can’t be helped I suppose’Opens in new window ]In response, Bakhurst said Mooney’s roles at the broadcaster “changed over the years” and “when people’s roles change, quite often their salaries change with them”.In 2020, RTÉ implemented a 15 per cent pay reduction for its highest-earning presenters as part of a restructuring plan. McInerney asked if the decision to reclassify Mooney as a producer was a “side deal” to avoid cutting his salary.Bakhurst said that was “a very unfair gloss to put on [Mooney]”, adding: “I don’t think he got a pay cut but he was on the staff salary he was on, and he was on an executive producer role already by that stage.”Bakhurst said Mooney was informed of RTÉ’s decision to reclassify him as a presenter but he “played no role in this”.“We told him this was happening, and he agreed that that was our decision, but he’s played no role in this at all. You know, he’s just carrying on with his work.”