Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I hope we will find out more about that in due course. The public and all of us who serve the public deserve to know the full extent of any such activities in due course.

I will ask a question on a point I touched on when this committee last considered cybersecurity. I was a teacher and other members were in different walks of life before entering the Houses of the Oireachtas. It concerned me that the computer in my classroom held very sensitive data relating to child protection and children's vulnerabilities, learning needs, educational needs, parental circumstances and so on. There was a whole lot of data on that computer, which was just in a primary school classroom. If you go half a kilometre down the road to your local HSE public health centre, you will find another data set. There is another in the local Garda station. There is a data set in each community service. People talk about hubs and spokes but the Government has tentacles of public service in each and every community in the country. Some of those data are held on computers that are 15 or 20 years old and are operating on old systems. They might be connected to the mother ship of the Department of Education or the Department of Justice but they are outposts and I do not believe they are sufficiently protected. Does Dr. Browne share that concern?