Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the committee to deal with this vital issue. We have had previous interactions on this, in particular at the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications. We have also had the NCSC review, the full report of which I request for this committee, excepting the redactions. It would be useful for what we are talking about. We all welcomed the increase in funding and capacity. I have previously said some of the experts said they believed there had been a failure to use the expert knowledge base we had in this State, especially in third level institutions, that had made a detailed study of this. However, we are where we are.

Mr. Lepassaar spoke about critical sectors or critical service providers, of which we have 70.

However, Finland has approximately 10,000. I accept that every state is not the same. I put it to the Minister of State that there is possibly a requirement for a reassessment in regard to that. He also spoke about investment across the board by American companies in cybersecurity being at 15%. While there has been an increase across Europe, it has possibly been insufficient. Perhaps it is something of an obligation that has been put in. This would probably need to be addressed more at a European level. I refer to operating systems built with a different business model at a different time. Software is not necessarily always suited from a cybersecurity point of view. Is there a possibility that there would be a requirement to put an obligation in that regard?

Regarding his own baseline standards for cybersecurity that have been released recently that go into that, it comes back to the scenario of where we are and what our plan is to ensure that we have all the due diligence done and as best we can. That is accepting that we have to be able to disrupt and avoid attacks for hygiene reasons and to have whatever defensive or counter-strike capacity that is required, to which I previously referred, but I accept does not fall within the remit of the NCSC.