On Wednesday, RTÉ confirmed it wrote down €3.6m on a partly failed IT project to replace its finance and HR systems.
First approved in September 2016, the new system, called the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project, was funded through money received from the sale of land in RTÉ in 2017.
The national broadcaster said that in 2023, it recognised the project was an “outlier” and hired consultants from Ernst & Young to conduct a review.
The details of the write-down were first revealed by The Currency website.
Now, newly appointed chair of the Media Committee, Labour’s Alan Kelly, has said the committee will invite RTÉ to appear before members in the coming weeks.
“The latest revelations from RTÉ of a massive write-down on a failed IT system demands serious attention,” Mr Kelly said.
In particular, Mr Kelly pointed to his time on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) during the RTÉ payments saga and questioned why the issue of the HR system was not brought to the committee’s attention then.
“At the time of the controversy in 2023, I and others asked at the PAC committee: was there anything else we needed to know. Why wasn’t this brought up then?” Mr Kelly asked.
“What about RTÉ’s commitments on openness and transparency with the public?
“There are a number of questions that must be answered in front of the Oireachtas committee immediately. Who was the director in charge?”
Mr Kelly said he also wanted to know what RTÉ director general Kevin Bakhurst knew about the project and when.
“Was RTÉ planning on burying this until the minister asked about capital projects?” Mr Kelly asked.
The Labour TD for Tipperary North said the members of the media committee would be discussing the issue.
“I will be working with my fellow committee members to invite RTÉ into the committee in the coming weeks to discuss this issue in detail, along with a range of other issues,” Mr Kelly said.
These, Mr Kelly said, included “the reform programme in the organisation, planned redundancies, how they are dealing with registering their broadcasters’ work outside RTÉ and the whole issue of bogus self-employment being atoned for, which I have a special interest in”.
Yesterday, Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan said he first learnt of the write-down after it emerged earlier this year that the Arts Council had spent almost €7m on a failed IT system.
When that was revealed, Mr O’Donovan requested a survey of all projects undertaken from 2020 by bodies and organisations under the remit of his department.
This, Mr O’Donovan said, was when the write-down by RTÉ came to light.
Mr O’Donovan also said the issue predates current management and the current director general.
Speaking to the News at One on RTÉ, the minister said he was surprised the issue was only emerging now and noted the numerous occasions that RTÉ appeared before Oireachtas committees.
“What surprised me and disappointed me was that there was ample opportunity during more than one occasion for the organisation to say, with regard to all of the other well-documented difficulties that there were, to say ‘we also have an impairment that is being carried forward from a set of accounts a number of years ago which we need to bring to the committee’s and the Government’s attention’. That unfortunately didn’t happen,” Mr O’Donovan said.
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