Ms Helen Dixon:

That is an interesting question in terms of corporate governance structures around the new powers we have acquired because this is something of a departure for ComReg. While we have had these long-standing powers, civil and criminal, the new administrative power we have involves ComReg investigating issues through an authorised officer and where there is suspicion of non-compliance, making a referral report to a panel of adjudicators that is now completely independent of us, notwithstanding the fact that it was nominated by us and appointed by the Minister with the intention under the legislation and the legal advice that it must operate completely independently. We are looking extensively as we prepare to stand up this new structure at the arrangements that will need to be in place.

There will need to be a completely separate IT system to be used by the independent adjudicators. There will be no communication between ComReg and those independent adjudicators. A chief adjudicator, who will be appointed, will convene the panel as necessary to hear a case where a referral report has been made from ComReg. We have extensive legal advice on hand regarding how we are setting up the arrangements. We are satisfied we can set up that adjudication function such that it will have the requisite level of demonstrable independence. It will be a new departure for us, however, and we will have to step through the first case to establish how it works in actual fact.

On the promotion of competition, as the Deputy will be aware, this is largely a deregulated market in terms of the mobile phone operators. As well as the primary operators, however, there are quite a number of virtual operators now and we can see there is a spread of users and consumers spread among all the operators in Ireland. If there are any specific issues of manifestations of the lack of competition-----