^ I was close:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTL_IrelandRTÉ / Telecom Éireann ownership[edit]
The company began operations in 1970 as RTÉ Relays, a subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann. It carried four channels – RTÉ Television, BBC1, BBC2, and Ulster Television. In 1984, the company merged with Dublin Cable Systems, itself the product of a merger of Marlin Cable with Phoenix Relays. In 1986, the Irish Government began to allow Irish cable companies to carry non-terrestrial (i.e. satellite) services. In the same year, RTÉ merged all of its cable operations (including two other cable companies, Galway Cablevision and Waterford Cablevision) to form Cablelink Limited.[1] As Cablelink, the company was Ireland's largest cable company by far, and expanded to a fifteen channel service (plus premium channels) gradually. In 1990, Telecom Éireann acquired 60% of the company from RTÉ. The biggest controversy the company managed to embroil itself during this time was a dispute with British Sky Broadcasting over carriage fees for Sky One and Sky News. This led to the two channels being pulled from the platform from 1992 to 1994. The "return of Bart Simpson" was prematurely announced by Cablelink several times before the channels actually reappeared.
The company also wished to develop broadband services in 1997/1998 but there was an embargo on developing and selling Internet services by the main shareholders, Telecom Éireann, but the management felt if it were developed and a trial launched then there would be no stopping this. To conceal this from the Board, they hired a small Dublin company The Communications Interactive Agency to manage and run the trial. To this end all purchases of equipment and Internet Services were done in their name. At the time they were one of the first to demonstrate VOIP in Ireland as a commercial service which was done by the then managing director Alex Gogan at the Press Launch, by dialling live the Speaking Clock in New York using Net2phone.com service.
At the time they were one of the first companies in Europe to trial and launch Broadband services. What stopped the trial from becoming a full roll out across their network was the purchase by NTL. It took the company almost four more years to integrate NTL Broadband service.
