O2 (Ireland)
former Irish telecommunications company
Telefónica Ireland was a broadband and telecommunications provider in Ireland that traded under the O2 brand (typeset as O2). O2 Ireland was previously called Esat Digifone when it was owned by Esat Telecommunications (and Telenor) from 1997 to 2006.
O2 Ireland became a subsidiary of Telefónica in 2006, after its parent company O2 in the United Kingdom was purchased. In June 2013, Hutchison Whampoa announced it would acquire the Irish arm of O2 for €780 million. O2 was merged into Hutchison Whampoa's subsidiary Three Ireland in March 2015.
History
1997–2000: Origin
In 1995, the government, with Michael Lowry as Minister for Transport, Energy, and Communications, authorised a second mobile phone network, to compete with Eircell owned by the semi-state Telecom Éireann. The licence was awarded to Esat Digifone, a joint venture between Denis O'Brien's company Esat Telecommunications and Norway's Telenor, which began operations in 1997. In 2008, the Moriarty Tribunal found that the awarding of the licence was influenced by payments made to Lowry by O'Brien.
2000–2001: BT ownership.
In 1999, Esat Telecom and Telenor began to dispute how Esat Digifone should be operated.
The public source identifies “O2 (Ireland)” as former Irish telecommunications company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ireland, former and Irish.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7072246. VIAF identifies the subject as 7145857926723022287. The Library of Congress control number is no2009163232. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2006, 2013 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “O2 (Ireland)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.