Director General of RTÉ
chief executive and editor-in-chief of RTÉ
The director general is the chief executive and editor-in-chief of public service broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ). The current director general is Kevin Bakhurst, who replaced Dee Forbes in the role in 2023.
Appointment and role
The RTÉ Board appoints the director general of RTÉ, who fulfils the roles of both chief executive officer and of editor-in-chief
Kevin Bakhurst disbanded the executive on 10 July 2023 in the wake of the RTÉ secret payment scandal, which comprised the company's top management. It was replaced by an interim leadership team.
The director general both reports to the board and sits on it "in an ex officio capacity".
At this time, the director general serves a term of five years (reduced from seven years), at the expiry of which he/she may ask for an extension.
2023 controversy
In June 2023, RTÉ admitted that it paid its top presenter Ryan Tubridy €345,000 more than publicly declared between 2017 and 2022. Dee Forbes was suspended as Director General a day prior to the controversy, and ultimately resigned with immediate effect on 26 June. Adrian Lynch, Director of Channels & Marketing, was appointed to the position of Deputy Director General; he also assumed the role of interim Director General following the suspension and resignation of Forbes and prior to the planned arrival of Kevin Bakhurst into that role in July 2023.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Director General of RTÉ” is chief executive and editor-in-chief of RTÉ. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Director, General and chief, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5280507. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023, 2017 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Director General of RTÉ” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.