Mr. Ciarán Ó hÓbáin:

It is in the nature of a state aid decision that the European Commission will repeat back to the member state what that member state is proposing to do so that there is clarity around what it is agreeing to. The decision that was taken in seeking an MSE was that existing operators were precluded from that competition. The ambition was to get a new operator into the market in Ireland to strengthen competition and introduce more competition into the market.

Any operator or anybody providing electronic communications services in Ireland must be an authorised communications operator and must register with ComReg as such. The only fair interpretation of this paragraph is that it is a statement that, at the outset of this process when seeking an MSE, the entity that would come forward to be an MSE could not at that time be an operator, but once it became an MSE, it could not operate the MANs without being an operator and it would so register with ComReg. That is how that should be interpreted and I am not quite sure what BT's analysis around it would be because no entity could operate the MANs without being registered with ComReg.