Mr. Pat Larkin:

The issue is that no one agency can solve this, and that is very clear. We have to treat this as a national security problem in which we are dealing with land, sea, air and cyber. We have resources deployed to protect and police those, with different responsibilities and so on. With regard to land, we have had reasonable integrity for the last 100 years or so, and we have not really had a viable land threat in the recent past. We are obviously worried about sea and air but, realistically, that is not impacting us. Cyber is impacting on us daily. We are dealing with customers who are losing millions of euro in cyberattacks, and that is in the commercial sector and some critical national infrastructure providers. The cyber realm is being penetrated daily. In the current geopolitical circumstances, we get the sense that in being on the wrong side of a particular alliance or in not being politically neutral, a cyberthreat can be effected very significantly against Ireland. If we look at the resources struggle to respond to the HSE attack, the NCSC response was broadly good given our experience in this field, but if there was a wider-scale attack, there are not the resources, public and private, in Ireland to deal with it significantly. There is a huge skills shortage.

Companies like ours and all our peers are currently tied up trying to respond to the customer base we have. We have difficulty taking on new customers to respond to. That is both in security monitoring and instant-response circumstances. We have to treat cybersecurity as a national security problem. The realm in which the problem exists is being penetrated daily. One strongly suspects that much of our critical national infrastructure has been penetrated to some degree, effectively meaning there are ticking time bombs waiting to be activated. We must deal with this as a national security problem and a national economic problem. This presumes escalation to a level in government that can cross-co-ordinate and provide the leadership and resources needed to co-ordinate defence, policing, foreign policy, law and international relations. It should be the responsibility of the Department of the Taoiseach as a national security problem. It requires a multi-agency response that demands co-ordination and policy. No matter how many resources we throw at the NCSC as an agency, it will not solve the problem entirely. Therefore, a public private partnership is needed to address it also.