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26th June 2023
11:45am BST
"I acknowledge that fee is significant and way beyond what many people could hope to earn. There are others who will, no doubt, have more to say about it I am sure, but my personal decision here this morning is to be open and honest with you," she said in the opening of her show.
Byrne said that with her fee comes a duty to treat her position with respect, adding:
"I hope that you can trust me and the team of journalists I work with, to cover this story with the same rigour and balance as we would any other story on this programme."As programme makers, our aim is to be consistent, fair, and professional and to respect the hard-earned trust that you, the audience, have in us," she also told her listeners. Byrne stressed that she knew nothing about Tubridy's additional payments, stating: "I wasn’t even aware that presenters' fees, including my own, were subjected to a Grant Thornton review. I knew absolutely nothing about it." As well as this, she explained that her absence from radio last week was not related to the ongoing controversy, but was instead down to a planned family trip. https://twitter.com/MiriamOCal/status/1673360204753166341
"For the purpose of transparency, honesty and clarity, I want to put on the record that my most recently published fee from RTE - 263,500 euro - is correct, as are the published fees for previous years. I have never received additional payments from RTE that were not publicly declared. "It's hard to put into words how incredibly sad I have been since this story broke last Thursday. I had no idea this was coming down the tracks. I feel you, our listeners and viewers, have been badly let down. I love RTE - it's a wonderful place to work, full of superb people who work very hard and conscientiously every day to deliver good programmes. Right now, there's profound shock, anger and sadness among everyone working there. "All we can do as journalists now, is cover this story as rigorously as we cover every other story. That's what we did on Prime Time last Thursday, on the day the story first broke, and that is what we will continue to do."Read more:
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