This is what the body of the article says "One market source described the European Commission’s ruling on AIB as a “free pass”. " I suspect that he meant that it was a free pass for the government which is free to do what it wants with AIB, whereas BoI had to sell ICS, and ptsb had to sell New Ireland.
The taxpayer owns 99.8% of AIB, so it's just one arm of the government. The government will recover most or all of the money invested through the sale of shares.
I imagine that the Business Editor will be annoyed with the headline.
Brendan