It doesn't seem to be about whether he is a presenter or a producer. It's about whether he had a permanent contract or not. His solution was to go and work for another station if RTE was not prepared to pay him a package which he thought he was worth.
It should certainly give food for thought for RTE staff in similar situation to sort themselves out - either regularising things with RTE, another employer OR making additional provision for pension and life insurance themselves.
In this case, Sean Rocks had been permanent since 2019, as the RTE article states.
Before that, he was on fixed term contracts. It is unclear what the pension arrangements were for those contracts.
There's pieces of the puzzle emerging in different articles, sometimes the emphasis is on the death in service benefit, sometimes on the pension.
It is also unclear how the death in service benefit is calculated - current pensionable salary or some calculation based on pensionable salary over years of service.
He was receiving an "allowance" for presenting, and this allowance was not pensionable and not counted towards death in service benefit.
Normally the "allowance" would be a top-up for occasional presenting duties. He was the main presenter of RTE Arena radio programme since 2009 so I am guessing that it was actually a significant part of his remuneration.
It has emerged that he was being paid a producer salary and only had an additional allowance in respect of his presenting duties, which wasn’t included in his pensionable pay.
Seán Rocks presented the culture programme ‘Arena’ for 16 years, but he only received an allowance for his presenting duties, which wasn’t included in his pensionable pay.
www.thejournal.ie
