The High Court has amended a passage in an earlier judgment concerning a dispute over access to confidential documents linked to Ireland’s GSM mobile licence process. The correction followed an application by Denis O’Brien, who argued that the passage misstated what the Moriarty Tribunal had formally found.
In a judgment delivered on 20 February 2025, Ms Justice Emily Egan accepted that the Tribunal had not made a formal finding of corruption in relation to the award of the GSM licence. She made the correction under the court’s inherent jurisdiction, while refusing O’Brien’s request to simply delete the sentence in question.
The passage was in a 27 January ruling on the plaintiffs’ application for further discovery or inspection of documents within an existing discovery order. O’Brien had declined to disclose documents provided to him in confidence by the Tribunal. The earlier judgment set out a balancing exercise between preserving the Tribunal’s confidentiality and the public interest in the proper administration of justice.
O’Brien said the earlier judgment wrongly stated that the Tribunal had concluded there was corruption at the highest level of Irish politics affecting the licence award. The plaintiffs, Persona Digital Telephony Limited and Sigma Wireless Networks Limited, disputed that the passage was erroneous. They argued it paraphrased the Tribunal’s conclusion that payments and other benefits were linked to Michael Lowry’s conduct in the GSM process and benefited O’Brien’s winning consortium, Esat Digifone.
The judge said the parties did not dispute that the Tribunal had made no express or formal finding of corruption concerning the award, although the plaintiffs maintained that it had reached that conclusion in substance. She said the Tribunal’s findings remained relevant context for the earlier balancing exercise, but were legally sterile and not admissible as findings in the proceedings.
Rather than remove the sentence without replacement, the court ordered it replaced with a summary of the Tribunal’s findings as set out by the Supreme Court in *Comcast International Holdings Incorporated v Minister for Public Enterprise & Ors* [2012] IESC 50. That summary described findings about Lowry’s influence on the evaluation process, improper payments and benefits, and deficiencies in the process that led to the licence award.
The court said the change would not alter the meaning or effect of the principal judgment or affect the outcome of the discovery motion. It directed that the original version be removed from the Courts’ website and replaced with the corrected judgment. The ruling did not decide the underlying proceedings or the admissibility or authenticity of the disputed documents.