Furious staff at Ireland’s national broadcaster have reacted with anger as RTÉ finds itself engulfed in yet another payments scandal, with insiders saying the mood at Montrose this week is one of exhausted disbelief.

‘Here we go again,’ a source told Extra.ie. ‘People are just totally and utterly fed up. We’ve been through all of this before, and it never seems to end.’

At the centre of the storm is presenter and producer Derek Mooney, who was found to have been omitted from RTÉ’s published list of its top ten highest-earning presenters for 2024 when, sources confirm, he ought to have been on it.

Mooney has not been a visible presence around the Montrose campus this week, with insiders suggesting he is keeping his head down as the controversy swirls around him.

The row has reignited long-simmering anger among rank-and-file staff, with colleagues also questioning why the late Sean Rocks, the much-loved presenter of RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena programme, was classified primarily as a producer rather than a presenter during his time at the station.

His partner, Catherine Bailey, met Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan this week to raise her concerns, saying the misclassification has had significant financial implications for her family since Rocks’ death last July.

RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst faced a grilling at a marathon two-hour meeting with the Minister, emerging to insist the broadcaster had ‘paid the price for transparency.’

He said RTÉ had voluntarily reclassified Mooney and placed the information in the public domain, only to find itself punished for doing so.

‘If we pay that kind of price when we discover something we want to put right, it’s not an incentive to be more transparent,’ Bakhurst said, in remarks that raised eyebrows among opposition politicians.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin was more blunt, telling the Dáil that the ‘dogs in the wild’ knew Mooney was a presenter and not a producer, while Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald accused RTÉ’s top brass of continuing to ‘play fast and loose’ with salary reporting despite the State handing the organisation €725 million in public money three years ago.

Minister O’Donovan, who asked RTÉ on his way out of the meeting whether there were ‘any more landmines,’ said he is pressing ahead with plans to place RTÉ under the oversight of the Comptroller and Auditor General. Legislation, he said, will go before the Dáil in the coming weeks.

The latest goings-on at RTE have rippled down to the ground staff who keep the station ticking along: ‘Everyone is so demoralised. It’s like Groundhog Day, every day.’