Communications Regulation Bill 2022: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2023-01-25
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Michael McNamara (IND), Clare

I move amendment No. 34:
In page 24, between lines 26 and 27, to insert the following:
“(2) A person affected by a high-risk vendor measure or a variation of such measure shall be informed of the making of such order as soon as practicable after the making of such an order and in any event within 5 days of the making of such an order.”.
Is there a particular reason for this? I have reservations about the fact that the high-risk vendor notice has to remain confidential because it is going to be very strange if a certain component just disappears from the network. It seems almost sinister where it is a bit like those photographs where people just start disappearing from them, and nobody knows why. I do not want it to appear that I am reading something sinister into everything but surely in the commercial world in which one supplies an essential component, and it is determined by the Minister that it is from a high-risk vendor so, it then has to be removed and one then can no longer, presumably, provide a service as a result of that, albeit on a temporary or permanent basis, or a product cannot be provided on a temporary basis while one sources an alternative component.
As I understand it, this high-risk vendor notice comes into immediate effect and one cannot say that a high-risk vendor notice is going to come into effect some time in the future. If that is the case, if Eir, for example, and I do not wish to discuss any company that is provides communication networks, cannot fulfil its contractual obligations because a Minister has determined that it has obtained components from a high-risk vendor that the previous day were perfectly lawful and the company had done nothing wrong, but today the company must remove those components, surely the company should be in a position to offer a rational explanation for its failure to fulfil its contractual obligations.

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Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:42+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-01-25