Dr. Richard Browne:

Of course. I will be quick. I will respond to the matters raised in no particular order.

As for the competence level of the NCSC, I have explained this already but I will give the committee the chapter and verse. We have all the various accreditations required of a CSIRT. Most pertinently, there is a comparative element to this. We received advanced CSIRT accreditation in 2019 during the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA, peer review process. Our peer review process involved the Dutch CSIRT. We are regarded by our peers as being an advanced CSIRT, a status not held by many CSIRTs in the European Union. In and of itself, that should not be surprising. This is what we do. As I said, we are lucky.

There has been a master's in cyberforensics in UCD for many years. A great number of our staff have been through that course, some recently, some a long time ago. Some of our staff have taught on the course for years. Incident response is our core competence. There are a large number of degree and master's courses and diploma and higher diploma courses. Most universities have several. However, cyber is a complex compound discipline involving entities from computer science to governance to technology. It is not a simple thing.