Gerry Ryan and RTÉ’s Cocaine Cover-Up

I picked up this small piece from the Family and Life web site (www.familyandlife.org/Index.html).

I have often wondered why top RTE presenters need to be paid so much. Well, in case you were wondering, it's important that they remain divorced both from truth and reality. As a result some of them, like Gerry Ryan, will have an expensive habit to feed. Keeping your head in the clouds can be a pricey business.

It's odd that dear old Gerry used to have a go at the old Drugs Barons since they partially facilitated his 'lifestyle'. It's also odd that he used to have a go at the clergy for facilitating child abuse when, of course, he partially funded an 'industry' which regularly facilitates murder:

The radio broadcaster, Gerry Ryan, was found dead in his Dublin apartment on April 30, 2010. The postmortem showed indications that cocaine and alcohol had killed him. However, the official report of the inquest was only made public on December 10 last year, and confirmed what many people had suspected. However, RTÉ was strangely silent about the cocaine habit of its once top star. He was one of our best, the station seemed to say, and—rightly or wrongly—we don’t want to hear anything bad about him.
It is very clear that RTÉ felt it necessary to engage in damage control over what must be considered a major scandal. After all, Gerry Ryan was one of their top performers, paid an astronomical yearly salary of €600,000, and, to cap it, is remembered for his uninhibited attacks during his radio programme on drugs and the drug bosses.
There are a few little questions that arise from Gerry Ryan’s actions. This was a man who presented himself as the fearless critic of hypocrisy and double standards, especially in the higher ranks of Church and State. He also used his celebrity status and morning radio programme to send out a strong anti-drugs message, even while spending part of his grand salary on feeding his cocaine habit. That might be considered hypocrisy in some quarters, but apparently not in RTÉ. More seriously, the revelation of Ryan’s double life will undoubtedly undermine the efforts of those working to dissuade young people from getting into drugs.
Cocaine is the chosen drug of the elite, and, judging by the report in the Sunday Times (20.12.'10) Ryan’s behaviour should not have been a complete surprise to his fellow workers.
Indignant at what he saw as RTÉ’s complicit silence, Gareth O’Callaghan, a prominent TV presenter and close friend of Gerry Ryan, spilled the beans, as it were. In an interview published in the Sunday Independent, he claimed that cocaine use is rampant in RTÉ. O’Callaghan is also a psychotherapist, specialising in anxiety and depression, and has first-hand knowledge of the effects of drug addiction. He revealed that Ryan was already an addict in 2003, and that other well-known figures in Montrose were regular coke consumers. He reiterated that Ryan’s cocaine use was common knowledge among friends and journalists.
The reaction to his revelations was predictable, denial from the station’s chiefs and indignation from its leading figures. Joe Duffy, another scourge of public corruption, stated that Ryan’s addiction “only inflicted harm on himself and not on anyone else”. Unbelievable! With its hand on its collective heart, RTÉ assured us that it knew nothing about cocaine use, and its silence was not a cover-up but done “largely out of respect for our late colleague and out of sympathy and respect for his family”, as Kevin Dawson, head of communications, put it.