About time RTE hit back over scurrilous cocaine slurs on staff

Date Published: {J}

It took RTE long enough to come out fighting as the allegations continued to fly over the life and death of Gerry Ryan – but when the lion finally roared over the weekend, it was with a real bite and vengeance.

And not before time, because whatever Gerry Ryan did or didn’t do in life, it was a giant step too far for the Sunday Independent to suggest that some drug dealer had half his client base working in Donnybrook.No doubt there are coke heads in RTE – just as, heaven forbid, there might even be in the bowels of the Sunday Independent – but to suggest this was a widespread problem, aided and abetted by bent cops who can keep celebrities out of the Joy, took this on to a different level entirely.

This whole thing has turned into a feeding frenzy, as the tabloids in particular – and the Sindo is a tabloid in attitude if not in size – try to outdo each other in fanciful claims about the drink and drug intake of the rich and famous.

Gerry Ryan took cocaine, and the traces in his system identified in his post mortem clearly weren’t the first that toxicology tests could have found over the years. But if he was consuming as much as some would have you believe, he’d make Pete Doherty look like a nun.

Nonetheless, he took drugs and for that his name will now be forever tarnished, but to move from that to suggest that RTE is some sort of hotbed of Charlie heads – without any attribution or substantive fact – is just tacky and sensationalist.

The irony is that these allegations would be made by the Sunday Independent of all papers, an organ that has built its ‘social coverage’ on the back of Dublin’s glitterati where drug abuse truly is as common as drinking pints.

This was, after all, the paper that built Katy French into something more than a clothes horse, and the paper that for years bestowed its version of fame on a string on nobodies with fast cars and model girlfriends – many of whom are by any standards popular purveyors of the old Columbian Marching Powder.

For far too long RTE has been afraid to incur the wrath of the Sunday Independent because these guys bear a grudge like nobody else – and their form of revenge is to turn its considerable guns back on their attacker. Just ask Pat Kenny or Joe Duffy.

But this was a step too far and finally RTE hit back with all of the force it could muster. It denied the unsubstantiated claims of widespread drug abuse within its organisation and put it up to the Sunday Indo to prove otherwise.

It defended the vast majority of its employees who no more take cocaine than they indulge in long nights drinking €400 bottles of champagne in nightclubs. That’s the preserve of Sunday Indo social diarists and commentators.

I knew Gerry Ryan, though not well. I knew he dabbled with cocaine, but I neither knew nor cared to what extent he was a user. He was a talented broadcaster and a genial host, but he more than anyone would know that – once he was identified as a drug user – the gloves would be off.

As it happens, I know a lot more of RTE’s broadcasters and I know them well enough to say that they are neither drug users nor abusers. But the sort of nonsense reported by the Sunday Independent tars them all with the one brush.

The reality is that you could probably stick a pin on the map and find a level of drug use in any company with more than 50 employees; and you could definitely make that claim about any second level school in the country.

But to build this up into some sort of Hollywood drama – dirty cops, drug dealers to the stars, coke heads all over the small screen and airwaves – is the stuff of pure fantasy.

It may be too late to defend Gerry Ryan’s name, and the truth is that his tarnished reputation is of his own making. There will undoubtedly be other RTE employees outed before the witch hunt finds another target.

But there won’t be many, and the notion that staff at the national broadcaster have a cocaine dealer on some version of a retainer is unlikely to have its day in court.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.