Cash-strapped RTE is slashing €25m from its budget next year, but saw no future in taking up a €650,000 offer to sponsor the Gerry Ryan Show on 2FM made earlier this year.

Tom Higgins, a businessman best known for Irish Psychics Live, a premium phone line service, says he made the offer at a meeting with RTE executives. He wanted to use Ryan, who is paid €559,000 a year, to promote a range of text-based competitions developed by his company, Realm Communications.

The psychic phone line services would not have been promoted on Ryan’s show, he said, because tarot-based products cannot be advertised on the state broadcaster.

Higgins, whose company has been embroiled in controversy in the past, said he was informed a few months after his meeting that his bid had been “unsuccessful” and that RTE had received a better offer from someone else. Ten months later the Ryan show still has no title sponsor.

The premium phoneline businessman, who hopes to become Ireland’s first space tourist, wants more details on why his proposal was rejected.

“It is absolutely unfathomable why RTE turned down my money,” Higgins said. “RTE run lots of competitions themselves using texts. They have worked for years with commercial service providers. Why not mine?”

RTE said it would be inappropriate to comment on commercially sensitive negotiations with sponsors and would-be sponsors.

Four years ago Higgins was ordered by Regtel, the premium-line regulator, to stop misleading customers with a marketing scam. Realm Communications was leaving missed calls on mobile phones. When users dialled back, they were given an advertisement and promotional offer for a costly premium-phone game.

In 2003 Irish Psychics Live was infiltrated by an undercover journalist who pretended to have the required “psychic” abilities. When this was exposed the company claimed a “mistake” had been made in hiring him.

In recent months 2FM offered sponsorship of the Ryan show to companies at a cost of €450,000 a year.

Ryan, who has boasted that he earns millions for RTE, presents Ireland’s third most popular radio show, with 342,000 listeners a day.

Higgins, who used to work with Ryan as a roving reporter covering “the weird and unusual”, has previously clashed with Ryan’s colleague, presenter Pat Kenny. In 2006 he complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) after Kenny interviewed him about his psychic phone line services. The BCC ruled in his favour and found that Higgins had been treated in an “unfair manner.”

Prior to reading out the BCC judgment, Kenny further infuriated Higgins by saying that “to put it at its kindest, the ‘so-called’ psychic service was shown to be valueless”.

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