Dr. Eoin Byrne:

I thank the Chairman. To respond to the Deputy's question and build on Mr. Larkin's previous point, there is an opportunity here to build on public-private partnership and we have started that already with Cyber Ireland, the national cybersecurity cluster organisation which is aiming to bring industry, academia and Government together to address specific challenges for industry but also for national security as well. It developed out of addressing the talent and skills shortage and a lot of the challenges have been clearly identified there already so I will not go through them again. It is also important to say there is a huge amount of work already being done in growing home-grown cybersecurity talent in Ireland. We have programmes there supported by Government, which are training up 5,000 professionals in cybersecurity skills all across different areas of the economy.

Fourteen new courses in cybersecurity were funded by the Government last year in our higher education sector. A cybersecurity apprenticeship programme is producing entry-level graduates for the sector, and just last year an €8 million project was funded under the Higher Education Authority human capital initiative, which aims to produce hundreds of new cybersecurity graduates. That is being led out of Munster Technological University and four other academic institutes. Cyber Women Ireland is addressing gender diversity, while other groups are looking at career promotion for secondary school students. We are involved in the cybersecurity academy and have summer camps for internships. A lot is being done but there is a lot more we can do. In the UK, for example, there is the CyberFirst programme for secondary school students and the US has cyber ranges, or virtual training facilities, to provide cybersecurity training and education to secondary school students, third level students and citizens.

Another key point is that one of the reasons for developing Cyber Ireland was the current low level of collaborative research and development between industry and academia. This is a severe challenge because there is currently a fragmented approach to cybersecurity research in Ireland, whereby academic and research entities are trying to address these urgent national scale cybersecurity challenges through a disconnected or small-scale response. We need to look at developing a national cybersecurity research centre to address this challenge. There would be potential to develop cybersecurity research solutions that could have sectoral applications for areas in which Ireland is already a leader, such as manufacturing, processing, the biopharmaceutical sector, industry 4.0 and so on. There is also-----