Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

I will talk first about the Stiles report about Eir's regulatory governance model. Regulatory governance is important because if Eir does not have a good way of managing its compliance it will not know whether it is complying, and neither will ComReg or the industry. If the industry does not know, its confidence to invest can be affected. There has been ongoing discussion between ComReg and Eir for many years. In 2013, Eir started a wholesale compliance programme intended to address some of those issues. ComReg stated it would review the programme after it had been running for a while and, based on ComReg's evaluation of how well it was doing, it would decide whether more needed to be done.

The Stiles report was one of the reports produced as a result of that programme and Eircom was encouraged to publish it in the interests of transparency. That report disclosed a number of failings, as well as some good things. Eir had made progress on operational issues like order processing, particularly in respect of its mature products. The report disclosed some breaches, some of which ComReg had already identified and about which we were taking compliance action. It probably speaks for itself that ComReg has taken five compliance cases and has sought penalties from the courts amounting to €10 million.

There is a sixth case where ComReg has formed an opinion of non-compliance but has not yet taken it to court. That speaks to the seriousness with which ComReg sees the breaches.

ComReg commissioned Cartesian and KPMG to review how well the governance model was working following the Stiles report. Those reviews found good things and serious flaws, particularly around strategic decision making and incentives and some information technology issues. ComReg consulted the industry on its views and there have been discussions with Eir about how those things could be remedied. Regulatory action may be taken, but there were also discussions about Eir taking action on a non-regulatory basis. Those discussions are part of settlement discussions relating to ongoing legal action. We were in court on Monday this week and informed the court those discussions were going well and that we hoped that, by 12 November, which is the next court date, an agreement would be finalised. As that is part of the ongoing court proceeding, I do not want to say more than that.