Dr. Richard Browne:

The committee is probably aware that Cyber Ireland is a collaborative group run out of MTU in Cork city but originally funded by IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland. Corporate governance responsibility for that organisation runs through that stream. For full disclosure, I am on the board of Cyber Ireland. The NCSC is fully engaged with that organisation and has been since its origins. It is also important to know that Cyber Ireland was centrally involved in helping us draft the national cybersecurity strategy. Some of the measures came from that process and from the group that makes up the board of that organisation. Cyber Ireland has a very important role to play in all this. It operates as a cluster and focal point for industry, the Government, the private sector and the third level sector in general. It has already had significant success in bringing these organisations together. The cluster membership alone is extremely comprehensive in terms of the industry in the State. It is bringing out a very substantial publication in the next couple of weeks, which will explain a lot of this in much greater detail.

I tacitly referred to this in my responses to Senator Craughwell, but it is important to note there is a European national co-ordination centre, NCC, role for research and development which includes this kind of clustering industry co-operation and academic co-operation piece. That process is under way at present. The formal designation of the NCC role will be clear in the next couple of weeks. After that point in time, our role with regard to Cyber Ireland may be changed slightly as well.

Quite aside from the Cyber Ireland perspective, we always work closely with academia in respect of our ongoing and, more recently, contractual relationship with University College Dublin, for expertise in some cases, but also with other universities in the State for little things. For example, when we need people to interview staff members, we tend to lean on universities because they have the technical expertise we need to determine what best practice actually is, and in understanding what the leading edge of technology is. Some very high-end research and development is happening in universities in the State right now, which is of extreme use to us.