Lowry lashes Tribune article

Independent TD Michael Lowry has said he acted in a responsible, fair and equitable manner in arriving at decisions when he was a Fine Gael minister in the Rainbow Coalition.

He said all his actions as minister, in respect of the granting of the second mobile phone licence, were rigorously scrutinised by the European Commission and successive ministers.

Deputy Lowry has also criticised the lengths to which some people have gone to draw what he called unfounded, unwarranted inference of political impropriety by him during his term as Minister.

In response to a Sunday Tribune article, he said by accessing the Eircom file only, the author received a one-sided biased view, which reflected Eircom's determination to defend its monopoly.

He said the Esat group mounted a major challenge to the Department of Enterprise's interpretation of the European Services' directive of 1990.

Deputy Lowry said during the evaluation of the Esat submission, he instructed Eircom not to release capacity to any operator if there was a risk that the law would be violated.

He said, subsequently, in a direct response to Esat, the Commission confirmed that Esat had a legitimate right to use routers in order to provide voice services to its customers.