The €725m funding plan for RTÉ is not a reward for the series of mistakes the organisation has made, the RTÉ Director General has said.
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Kevin Bakhurst said it had been a tough 13 months for the organisation and the people involved and that a series of structures had been put in place to ensure "this cannot happen again".
"We've set out a detailed response to the Government expert reports about how this organisation will be more transparent and more accountable and those events will not happen again. We've put in place the structures to ensure they won't."
Mr Bakhurst said it had "long been the case" that RTÉ's funding had not been sufficient to deliver what its public service remit is.
The funding plan announced by the Government yesterday includes a €725 million three-year fund for RTÉ - €225m next year, €240m in 2026, and €260m in 2027.
The funding will come from both the existing TV Licence fee and the Exchequer.
When asked about comments from Virgin Media that said RTÉ had been rewarded for inefficiency and bad practice, he said he did not agree.
"I don't think it's a reward for that, I think it's a reward for dealing with previous bad practice and I think it's a reward for setting out a strategy that is unanswerable in its logic and in delivering a modern public service broadcaster that can absolutely deliver for audiences into the future," he said.
Mr Bakhurst said the Government had made it clear that it supports the strategy RTÉ had presented to them, which he described as "robust".
The DG also said that the cost of moving away from using older buildings on the Donnybrook site is less than it would be to upgrade them.
He said a significant amount of the money allocated by the Government will go to funding this move over a five-year period.
He said the cost of moving to a new building, including the digital infrastructure, will be around €150m "and we've said that publicly and the cost of remaining in the old buildings would have been €300m, which we would never have dreamed of asking for".
In relation to the bill for bogus self-employment contracts, Mr Bakhurst said that the organisation has put aside just over €21m at the moment to pay for that.
He said "the vast majority of the money we'll spend in the strategy is directly to benefit audiences, so we'll be investing further in the RTÉ Player in terms of the functionality of it, making a better experience".
He adding that "overall a huge amount of this money will actually go into content for audiences as well as into things like the Player, a new News app, a new audio app".
"And we are behind in terms of how people can access our excellent radio stations and podcasts. We need to make that a much better experience and we're then investing in more content for things like podcasts for audiences."
Speaking on the same programme, Labour Senator Marie Sherlock said she does not believe questions over long-term funding for all of broadcasting were answered by the Government yesterday.
She said "the elephant in the room" is that RTÉ depends significantly on commercial advertising and described the funding plan as a missed opportunity by the Government to reform public service broadcasting.
"I think there is an overwhelming sense that we have a sticking plaster now for the next three years, but there's no long-term vision, no concrete vision for how public service broadcasting is going to be funded into the future.
"And I think there's a fundamental problem with that."
