[bkman1990]

I would imagine, even without the inevitable outcome of it's incoming punishment from the government, that the morale of people working in RTÉ right now is a very intense and stifling one nowadays. The response of this scandal from the public has been very profound. It has really rocked RTÉ's reputation to it's core. The main topic of the entire conversation among the public who would have paid the licence fee in the past are now thinking that a major change of culture now has to take place at the broadcaster.

However the question of whether the current reputation of RTÉ can be repaired in the future is another one to answer that has to be addressed in future. In one way; the whole manner in how the recruitment process for the new DG by the board of RTÉ has been a big indicator to me in how they wanted to move away from the eye of furthering commercial interests in the future. They hired someone in the form of Kevin Bakhurst who seemingly has the perfect credentials to run the broadcaster within a purely public service capacity.

Dee Forbes was someone who had that commercial background in the past. She was brought in as DG of RTÉ after she worked for Discovery Networks Inc which has now morphed into Warner Brothers Discovery run by David Zaslav.

When David McRedmond applied for the job of DG a few months ago. The RTÉ board didn't want him to take it because he was seen as too commercial for RTÉ's interests. That to me sounds like that RTÉ didn't want to go down the route of having more commercial interests becoming a bigger influence in the future. The RTÉ board had to work within the framework of the Broadcasting Act at the time of writing to ensure that no more talk of commercial interests were incoming for the broadcaster at that point.

If RTÉ had breached that part of the legislation while they were publicly advertising for this job. The government and the new media commission would have been on their backs like a ton of bricks. But the talk of having barter accounts to enhance Ryan Tubridy's pay packet behind their backs has given RTÉ the same or even a bigger level of punishment that has now put them into this mess.

Is it now the time that RTÉ has to become a smaller form of the BBC which has to be run without advertising in the near future? Or is it time to see RTÉ scrapped for good? These are some very important questions that has to be addressed by every Irish person who pays the TV licence to fund RTÉ's output in the here and now.

It really is a huge shame that RTÉ has gone down this road. We do need an Irish PSB that is both accountable to the people and for the people of Ireland as a whole. And it will take a lot of emotional soul searching to get that job done.