THEY’RE NOT making it easy in the Caribbean for Irishman Ian Burns to get his REDjet low-cost airline off the ground.

REDjet this week had its inaugural flight from Barbados to Guyana but had to postpone flights to Jamaica and is still waiting for clearance for Trinidad and Tobago.

“I can tell you that we have looked at commencing services in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and to Guyana, and obviously in Barbados we were granted our AOC on April 15th,” Burns told a media briefing on Wednesday.

“We have met all the air safety and worthiness tests of all the civil aviation tests of all those countries, so one can only assume now that the issues are political. They certainly aren’t technical or anything to do with air worthiness or safety.”

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IT’S SHAPING up to be a remote controls at dawn duel between the country’s two biggest pay TV providers. Having invested €400 million on its network and secured a large slice of the broadband market, UPC Ireland’s new boss Dana Strong last week expressed her desire to regain lost ground on TV subscriptions, where it has slipped to number two behind Rupert Murdoch’s Sky.

But Sky isn’t sitting on its hands. Subscription prices have been frozen until 2013 and it has just secured a deal to broadcast BBC3, BBC4, CBeebies and CBBC as part of its digital TV service. These are already available on UPC’s platform.

So, when will Sky start offering broadband and phone services here?