I return to the €120,000 in secret payments made by RTÉ to Ryan Tubridy between 2017 and 2019. It is not acceptable that we are being told it could be another month before we have any clarity about how those payments were made.

It is impossible to understand how RTÉ thought that would fly. For a start, if RTÉ identified that €120,000 over and above his published salary was paid to Mr. Tubridy, how can it then claim ignorance as to how those payments were made? How did RTÉ even identify the amount of €120,000 in the first place if it does not know where it came from? Are we to assume that the difficulty in tracking this payment is because it was part of another commercial relationship, with the invoice being anonymised and routed through a third-party company in another jurisdiction? Two Oireachtas committees are supposed to meet over the next two days to try to get to the bottom of this financial quagmire, but we all know that they will not be able to without all of the relevant information. The Taoiseach said earlier that he has not received any explanation from RTÉ as to why it will take four weeks to publish the report on the payment relating to the 2017-19 period. What is the Taoiseach going to do about this? Will he request that whatever information is available about that payment is put into the public domain today?

As the Deputy knows, both today and tomorrow, RTÉ executives and board members will be before committees. I see no reason why they should not put any information in respect of that payment in the public domain as soon as possible. I do not understand why it should take four weeks for the Grant Thornton report to be completed. However, there may be good reasons that I just do not know about. It is important that the question be put to RTÉ's representatives at the committee meetings today and tomorrow.

The Taoiseach recently received a detailed report from Unite the Union on the case of four of its members working for Murphy International Limited at the Rusal Aughinish Alumina plant in Limerick in an action the union described as tantamount to union busting. The plant is owned by UC RUSAL, whose majority shareholder is the billionaire Russian oligarch and Putin supporter Oleg Deripaska. While the Irish Government has been very vocal when Deripaska faced sanctions due to Putin’s war on Ukraine, its silence on workers’ rights in this case is deafening. The Government simply replied to the union to tell it that it can take unfair dismissals case. We all know that that process will be long, uncertain and unlikely to mean reinstatement. I am asking the Taoiseach to commit to bringing in legislation that will protect union activists from dismissal where they organise in circumstances where their employers should be bound to recognise them. Will he commit to writing to this Russian oligarch to tell him that he can expect no State contracts paid by the taxpayer as long as he treats workers in this manner?

I thank the Deputy very much for her question. We already have legislation protecting workers from victimisation in the context of trade union activity. We are developing new legislation to put into our Irish law the EU directive on collective bargaining and national minimum wages.

I will not be writing to any Russian oligarchs, quite frankly,. I certainly will not be writing to one who is not the majority owner of that particular company.