Ms Mairéad McCabe:

The reason is that initially a role was given under regulations to the chief technical officer function within the Department and this Department was endeavouring to identify, across all of government, which would be the most appropriate body because it was not initially evident that ComReg would be a neat fit with it. It has taken some time and consideration of a number of options for us to identify that there was potential to appoint ComReg, to enter into discussions with it, and then to move towards the formal designation once we obtained a ministerial decision.

There were some delays encountered from the volume of work due to Covid and the time it took to arrive a decision to appoint ComReg. It is in safe hands in that there is that oversight of trust service providers at the moment. There are only two in the market and there is a very active process in train to designate, ComReg as the supervisory body. Looking to the future we could anticipate that there would be substantial growth in the number of trust service providers, including in Ireland. We need to get it right in the primary or the secondary legislation that we double check back that ComReg is a good fit for this.