Pat Kenny has said he will never return to RTE and claimed that the creation of Claire Byrne Live proves bosses knew they were wrong to axe his show The Frontline.
The veteran presenter voiced his despair when RTE axed the programme in December 2012 and subsumed elements of it into Prime Time with Miriam O’Callaghan and Claire Byrne.
Speaking at the Virgin Media Autumn launch this week, where he announced the return of Pat Kenny’s Big Debate, he said he will never go back to the State broadcaster.
When asked if he would have any interest in Sean O’Rourke’s radio slot if he retires next year, the 71-year-old told the Irish Daily Mirror: “No, when you move on, you move on. I’d never go back.
“There are times in your life when you do certain things and I am enjoying Newstalk.
“I have a different kind of freedom and a different kind of relationship with the reader on Newstalk and it has been a good change and I have no regrets.”
He added: “It’s well known I wasn’t happy with the subsuming of The Frontline into Prime Time and once I left it became Claire Byrne Live and it escaped from Prime Time again.
“So I think that’s a tacit acknowledgement that that decision was wrong.”
Meanwhile, when asked if he misses his days on the likes of RTE Investigates, or would like to pitch a similar show to Virgin Media, he said that they wouldn’t have the time or money to make it happen.
He explained: “The kind of programme that RTE Investigates is, and I know the documentary on the guards they are doing here [Virgin Media] is hard hitting, but they are hugely, horrendously expensive to do.
“I mean an RTE Investigates programme, the kind of resources for one of those might be the equivalent to the amount of money for several Late Late Shows.
“And yet the revenue that comes from one of those shows would be a fraction of that of one Late Late Show.
“Where I am now in Newstalk and in TV3 they don’t have that kind of money to invest in that kind of programming but hopefully here in Virgin Media One they will have the resources to do a certain amount of that but it is expensive.
“I don’t really have the leisure to [put myself forward] for that kind of stuff now I’m really busy with Newstalk, I’ll be doing a limited amount of programmes on Virgin Media this year but I don’t have the time to do that kind of stuff.”
“I mean a guy asked me to do a documentary on elephants in Africa a couple of years back because my father was with Dublin Zoo, but I just haven’t had the time or leisure to take myself off to Africa.”
And weighing in on the debate about whether the next Late Late Show host should be a woman, he added:
“I don’t care whether it is male, female, bi, trans - it shouldn’t matter what the gender of the host is, as long as they do the job and people like them doing it.”
