Revenues at Sky Ireland's operations totalled £510 million (€595m) last year, new figures show. According to a Sky Ireland spokesman, revenues at the Sky's Irish business increased marginally year on year.

Sky’s Ireland branch revenues are made up of pay TV, broadband and telephony income.

The Sky Ireland business achieved the year on year increase in revenues in spite of its move to pause Sky Sports subscriptions to business customers, such as pubs, across the country while they remained shut last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Sky Ireland spokesman was commenting on new accounts filed by a UK-based Sky entity, Sky Subscribers Services Ltd which breaks out the revenues recorded by Sky's Irish subscription business.

A change in the prior year’s reporting period which led to 18 months of revenues being recorded in that financial year meant that the headline figures showed that revenues at Sky’s Irish operation decreased by 24pc from £673m to £510m in 2020.

“The apparent decline is just a function of the change in reporting period,” the spokesman said.

The directors’ report attached to the accounts state that Irish revenues has seen the impact of Covid-19 on direct-to-consumer sales.

They stated that direct-to-consumer revenues have been negatively impacted and that future periods may be negatively impacted, as a result of lower sports subscription revenues due to the extent of reopening of the firm’s commercial customers.

On the move to pause subscriptions last year, the Sky Ireland spokesman stated: "Supporting our Sky Business customers during an extremely challenging period has been very important to us. We therefore made the decision to pause subscription charges for our Sky Business customers while they have remained closed.”