the old .ie TLD used to be run by UCD (a college here in Dublin) and indeed the ie nameservers, even now, list a variety of nameservers of 3rd parties, includin

the old .ie TLD used to be run by UCD (a college here in Dublin) and indeed the ie nameservers, even now, list a variety of nameservers of 3rd parties, including Esat (a company acquired by BT) and netsource (which was acquired by Magnet in 2006) as well as a dec.com domain. $ dig +short ie ns ns3.ns.esat.net. gns1.domainregistry.ie. uucp-gw-1.pa.dec.com. ns-ie.nic.fr. uucp-gw-2.pa.dec.com. banba.domainregistry.ie. gns2.domainregistry.ie. b.iedr.ie. ice.netsource.ie. Up until about 2004, domains here in Ireland were being sold for extortionate amounts of money compared to other TLD's (100 euros a pop from the registry). There was some scandal regarding the body running the registry and the head of the body Michael Fagan was essentially forced to resign circa 2002