No room to improve at RTÉ's Montrose campus

Property drama is rarely too far away from the RTÉ schedules, but these days the refurb talk is off-screen too.

At a town-hall meeting with RTÉ staff on Tuesday, the prohibitive cost of refurbishments to buildings on its Montrose campus – deemed necessary by 2030 to meet public sector environmental standards if RTÉ is to continue to use them – was laid out. It’s a contentious subject among RTÉ employees. The morale-draining impact of working in crumbling, dated workplaces is just the half of it.

In the course of explaining why Fair City and the Late Late Show will have to be made off-site in future – and possibly by independent production companies – director general Kevin Bakhurst has repeatedly stressed the property angle. He hasn’t wavered from his stance that plunging millions it doesn’t have into “revamping all these very nice, but quite old buildings on the site” is “not the right way to spend public money”.

With the campuswide price tag for such a project placed at an eye-watering €300 million, there are many outside RTÉ who would agree. But management position’s has not been readily accepted by the substantial number of RTÉ employees who could ultimately be affected by Bakhurst’s “smaller RTÉ” vision.

With RTÉ head of property and services Troy Bannon on hand, the meeting in Studio 4 – home to the Late Late – heard that quantity surveyors have calculated a potential refurbishment bill of €176 million just for the buildings to the southeast of the RTÉ canteen.

This 14-acre heart of the campus includes the visibly mid-century television centre, which would theoretically require upgrades costing €137 million to strip back to its walls and start again. The cost of revamping the adjacent Stage 5, the library building, the more modern Stage 7 and various site-enabling works would all swell the total outlay.

As for the other nine acres that RTÉ currently occupies – the stretch that includes the antiquated radio centre and the corporate building hosting Bakhurst’s own office – they seem set to be first to be jettisoned, although whether this will entail a sale or just an evacuation is unclear.

Alongside the site consolidation plan, RTÉ's property agenda also includes an ongoing search for off-site studios to produce Fair City and the Late Late Show, plus its ambition to relocate RTÉ Cork to a new building. The existing one, in keeping with the spirit of the media industry, is “not fit for purpose”, according to Bakhurst, “and keeps flooding”.

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Business recovery specialist Ken Tyrrell joins Ciarán Hancock on Inside Business to analyse the consultants' research on Irish insolvencies over the first three quarters of 2024 and get a handle on how many more business failures are potentially in the pipeline as we head towards 2025.

Also on this week’s episode, Irish Times Work Correspondent Emmet Malone talks us through two industrial disputes affecting big-name multinationals here.

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