A bill designed to establish a three-person commission in place of the current telecoms regulator, Ms Etain Doyle, is to be introduced in the autumn, the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, said yesterday.

Speaking at a telecoms conference - which Ms Doyle was attending - Ms O'Rourke said the regulator was a competent, fair, judicious person who executed her duties with a professional attitude. However, she said there was too much responsibility placed on one person's shoulders. For this reason the new Bill would increase the number of regulators from one to three.

Ms O'Rourke said the commission of regulators would strengthen the power available to regulators but would be based around the central element of accountability.

She said the new Bill would be a "catch-up Bill" to the 1996 Act, which established regulation in the telecommunications sector but which had left out the core element of accountability.

The 1996 Act had at a stroke shaken off the shareholding and referee role from Government and led to the startling situation where the regulator didn't even have to attend Oireachtas committees, said Ms O'Rourke. This quite clearly had to be rectified, she added.

A spokeswoman for the regulator's office would not comment on the proposals yesterday or whether Ms Doyle would consider joining the three-member panel when established.

Ms O'Rourke made the comments while addressing a conference organised by the Association of Licensed Telecommunication Operators - operators other than Eircom - entitled, "Access to Bandwidth: Delivering Competition in the Local Loop". For the first time, Ms O'Rourke said she was committed to introduce primary legislation to enable full local loop unbundling sometime next year. Unbundling the local loop is the process which would allow telecoms operators access to Eircom's local network to provide high-speed data, Internet and broadband services direct to customers.

She said the Department of Public Enterprise would investigate the legislation needed to unbundle the local loop.

Ms O'Rourke said she was keen on competition and liberalising the market. However, she emphasised that arrangements to unbundle the local loop needed to be underpinned by legislation.

Later, Mr Pearse O'Donoghue of the European Commission said the Commission had called on all member-states to enact appropriate measures to provide full unbundled access to the copper loop by December 31st, 2000.

He said this was to increase the level of competition and technological innovation in the sector.

Mr Don Stockdale, associate bureau chief of the US communications watchdog, said the US had seen an "explosion" of maturity in the last year with regard to the unbundling of the local loop.

He said it was providing consumers with access to broadband services. Some 55 per cent of the US public now have access to digital subscriber line services and some 25 per cent of city dwellers had a choice of four or more providers of such services.

Mr Pat Galvin, head of regulatory affairs at Eircom, said the scale of regulation proposed to introduce local loop unbundling was "simply unprecedented". He said the scenario of Eircom continuing to subsidise the construction and upgrade of Ireland's networks, while at the same time allowing access to competitors, was so manifestly unreasonable and damaging to the Irish national network that it was simply not an option.