Dr. Gary Healy:

I will address the issue around ComReg's powers and the Article 19 case, that Deputy Lawless mentioned. We are a company that is the most regulated of all the companies in the sector. Much of our focus is on trying to avoid situations where we are having to go to court. I do not think that either ComReg or our company wants to go to court. In our situation we are happy that ComReg has powers and needs to enforce those powers and use them but we would like to have a situation where we are not actually in court. In a lot of cases, we find that we can resolve the issues among ourselves without going to court. Having said that, what ComReg is looking at is around civil powers and having the power to set a fine itself without having to go to the courts and looking for a judge to do that. We have some concerns around that because in terms of the cases that have been brought to us and which we have been brought to the High Court for, we believe that we have resolved those issues. We brought them to the attention of ComReg in a number of cases and we resolved them very quickly. The harm to the industry was very limited yet the level of fines that ComReg wanted to impose - and it would have gone through studies in trying to assess that - was very high. We felt that was not the intention of the powers that ComReg had, and that is why the Article 19 case was brought. I do not want to go into any more detail on that, because it has been discussed. It was not the intention of Eir to find ourselves in court. We want to have a well resourced regulator who is able to bring sanctions against operators who are not abiding by the rules. We feel that needs to be a very transparent process for ComReg in talking to operators and trying to get an amicable solution and resolve the issue before it goes to the High Court. That has worked well in most cases to the benefit of both Eir and ComReg.