Country Living with Francis Farragher

Money has been more of a necessary nuisance in my life than anything else. Okay, so we all need the old lucre to survive, but I still go back to my old mantra, that if even you win lotto tomorrow, it won’t make you one day younger or if you’re suffering from a terminal illness it won’t make one jot of difference to you.

Young lads out the country back in the late 1960s and early 1970s lived through fairly frugal times. Here and there we’d listen rather enviously to kids who got allocations of pocket money but it never seemed to come the way of myself or any of my classmates.

Income was generally confined to farm work carried out neighbours such as helping out with the shearing, bringing home the turf and the grinding work of thinning beet or turnips. My late father’s philosophy about money was that while it mightn’t make you happy it could help you to ‘enjoy your misery’.

All that is just a bit of background into the ongoing money, salary and pay-off scandals at RTE that have come to light since the pin was pulled from the grenade around March of last year, when Ryan Tubridy announced that he was stepping down from his role as Late Late Show presenter.

We probably all thought at the time that this was essentially a one or a two-person issue but now for the past year we’ve been bombarded with one financial revelation after the next . . . the sums of money are quite extraordinary and nearly incomprehensible for someone who worked in the bog for £1 per day so many moons ago.

Like a lot of other ordinary people, my head is in a swirl with one revelation after the next and we all hit that point where we tend to switch off when we hit the saturation of one more resignation or payout. That said the scale of the figures being bandied about has to slip into the scandalous category, which might be acceptable, if the RTE was an entirely commercially funded entity, but of course it’s not. The ordinary Joe Soaps like ourselves tend to religiously cough up our €160 a year to fund the national broadcaster.

Pictured: The ‘ordinary workers’ at RTE making their point last week as the revelations continue.