The Supreme Court was told yesterday that a High Court judge applied an "unforgiving, overly suspicious and unduly narrow" analysis of an evaluation report, leading to her decision to quash the award of the State's third mobile phone licence to Meteor Communications.
Mr Donal O'Donnell SC, for the Director of Telecommunications Regulation, said few written documents could survive the kind of analysis to which Ms Justice Macken had subjected the evaluation report assessing the bids for the third mobile licence.
That report awarded higher marks to Meteor Communications than British telecommunications company Orange Communications, and the director, Ms Etain Doyle, had decided the licence should go to Meteor.
Orange successfully challenged that decision in the High Court which, in October last year, quashed the award of the licence and remitted the matter to the director for reconsideration.
In her 247-page judgment, Ms Justice Macken found the director's decision was objectively biased and unreasonable and also ruled the director's failure to give Orange reasons for not securing the licence was wrong in law.
Both the director and Meteor appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court. The appeal hearing began on Tuesday.
Continuing his submissions yesterday Mr O'Donnell, with Mr Gerard Hogan SC, for the director, argued Ms Justice Macken's decision contained some substantial errors and showed she did not have a full grasp of many technical and factual aspects of the case.
He contended the judge had misunderstood and misrecollected aspects of the evidence and used these misunderstandings as the basis for levying serious criticism and allegations of objective bias against the director.
The judge on some occasions had criticised the director for failing to disprove issues that were never actually alleged.
Counsel said Ms Justice Macken also exhibited a misunderstanding of and lack of sympathy with the best application methodology which was applied in the evaluation of the bids from the two applicants for the licence.
The appeal continues today before the five-judge court, presided over by Mr Justice Keane.
