[Rdd]

Believe it's due to the ITV deal with Virgin Media to provide their programming on the Irish VM (e.g VM1, VM2) channels.

Essentially yes. ITV3 and ITV4 were on Sky in Ireland for a short period in the mid-2000s, but there’s some confusion as to whether they were ever meant to be there and it may have been a hangover from Granada Plus and Granada Men and Motors, both of which were available here.

ITV3 and ITV4 were briefly pulled from what was then still UPC for a while in 2010-11. They returned but with significant restrictions on sports content on ITV4. (There would be odd occasions in the 2011-2014 period, where matches from the same tournament were perfectly fine to show if they were on UTV but blocked if on ITV4). I think these restrictions aren’t quite as prominent now as they once were.

ITV2 was also available on UPC/VM for a period in the 2010s but was never on Sky. It was removed when VM realised that VM Two effectively showed virtually all its high profile programmes and I recall the excuse given was basically to save space rather than any rights issue.