The Dáil week kicked off with a heartwarming moment before hostilities commenced. At the start of business, the Ceann Comhairle drew attention to a young man sitting above in the Visitors’ Gallery. Breaking with the normal tradition of not welcoming anyone during Leader Questions, Verona Murphy asked the House to give a special welcome to 13-year-old Austin Appelbee – “an incredible young man”. Austin made world headlines in February after he swam for hours and then ran 2km to get help for his mother and two younger siblings after they were swept out to sea in Western Australia. TDs loudly applauded and cheered the bashful hero, whose mother Joanne is from Co Monaghan.Austin also met the Taoiseach and Tánaiste in Government Buildings. Simon Harris presented him with a signed Monaghan GAA jersey. Yes, indeed. Signed by members of the ... eh, Fine Gael parliamentary party.The lad swam 4km and ran for another 2km to alert the emergency services and save his family before collapsing with exhaustion.Austin Appelbee with his family earlier this year after the incident. Photograph: AuBC via AP So obviously Fine Gael felt a really big gesture was required. And speaking of unusual gifts, here’s the one which keeps on giving ...What is it with the management in Montrose?It’s like the world cliff diving championships out there. RTÉ plunged into crisis. Yet again.If crisis were a sea, the national broadcaster would never be out of it.There’s always something bobbing about to keep it in the news between financial scandals: unpopular new jingles, falling ratings, slumping licence fee sales, dodgy boxes, the threat from streaming and social media platforms, hordes dispatched overseas to cover one football match, more outsourcing and dispirited staff.The latest payments controversy involving an RTÉ top earning presenter concerns nature loving wildlife broadcaster, Derek Mooney, a presenter whose generous salary was concealed for a number of years because he had been classified by management as a producer.From the flip-flops, barter accounts and Ryan Tubridy uproar three years ago to today’s flora and fauna fiasco with Mooney, the latest revelation about the organisation’s unorthodox accounting methods when it comes to star players has cast it into the full glare of the political spotlight again. RTÉ’s embarrassments are box office. Which is why Sinn Féin leader, Mary Lou McDonald, headed straight for Donnybrook and the latest difficulties as her topic of choice for Leaders’ Questions.Meanwhile, two Dáil committees are attacking their grills with wire brushes in anticipation of a return from some executive prime cuts. The Media Committee are first out on Wednesday at lunchtime when director general Kevin Bakhurst and his deputy Adrian Lynch will be joined by a number of officials from the Department of Patrick O’Donovan to discuss RTÉ funding, pensions and “other matters”.Minister for Communications Patrick O'Donovan speaks to the media in Dublin on Tuesday. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA Wire In a press release teeing up the meeting, chairman Alan Kelly said the committee welcomes this “timely engagement”. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the heavyweight Public Accounts Committee is waiting in the wings for its chance at the hot coals. It won’t happen on Thursday as the meeting is about climate related spending, but members are expected to expand on its correspondence with RTÉ over the sending of 41 staff to the Czech Republic to cover Ireland’s World Cup qualifying game.The committee is unlikely to leave it at that and will be keeping a close eye on developments. Back to Tuesday, when the approach taken by Government to the revelations over Mooney’s salary arrangements in this evolving story took an interesting turn away from the treatment of star performers and focused on the majority of staff who labour away without the star designation.McDonald took a familiar tack, citing the Mooney payment classification as proof that the Government has “failed to take on the culture of arrogance and privilege” of the “top brass” in RTÉ while ordinary working people have their backs to the wall trying to make ends meet. “Strangely, in 2020, Mr Mooney’s role was reclassified as a producer rather than a presenter, although the dogs in the street know that Derek Mooney is a presenter” she pointed out.End this management attitude that “the rules don’t apply to them” and sort out the situation, she told the Taoiseach.“So the Government must now run RTÉ, apparently. Is that your latest assertion?” retorted Micheál Martin. He believed the current management is trying to get to grips with the situation now. [ Number of RTÉ workers earning more than €100,000 increased more than a third in past five yearsOpens in new window ]As for the Sinn Féin leader saying the dogs in the street knew Mooney’s real job description, the Taoiseach remarked “I’d say the dogs in the wild knew”.An attempt at a funny line there (Mooney Goes Wild is the name of Derek’s popular programme). He was rewarded with outburst of feral howls.But Micheál was more concerned by what he thinks “is the real disparity” between how some workers in RTÉ are treated in comparison to others. It speaks to a lack of structure around how people “are treated from a human resource point of view”.This echoed similar comments from him earlier in the day before the Cabinet met.They were echoed by Harris who said “there’s a lot of hard work and decent people in RTÉ who will feel let down by this latest set of revelations ... it’s beginning to look like there’s a little bit of an upstairs-downstairs situation going on in RTÉ” where certain people get more favourable treatment and that’s “not fair in any organisation”.RTÉ’s continuity drama department started early on Tuesday morning when O’Donovan said he had been expecting to go on Morning Ireland to talk about a swimming pool but was dropped at very short notice. In a serendipitous twist, Newtalk’s Anton Savage kindly took him in so he could talk about an awful lot more than a new aquatic centre in the west. A lot of RTÉ staff had been on to him privately to complain about how the organisation is run.He was still talking about RTÉ on his way into Cabinet. In a rather baffling aside to his criticism of Mooney’s “recategorisation” as a producer, he declared: “It’s a very fancy word – I don’t know if the public will understand it – I never heard of it until last week.”Would you g’way outta that. As Minister for Media, Arts and Culture he spends his time rubbing shoulders here and abroad with film and TV producers, often trying to get them to shoot productions over here. And as a TD for Co Limerick, he has talked about meat producers on many occasions in the Dáil. Later in the afternoon, there was more talking when he held a very lengthy meeting with the director general and the chair of the RTÉ authority. It must be a difficult week for the man who finds himself in the eye of the storm. Appropriately enough, there were statements in the afternoon on National Biodiversity Week. Jennifer Whitmore, the Social Democrats spokeswoman on Agriculture, had some kind words for Mooney, singling out his recent documentary about urban nature for very positive mention.