Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely. The truth is the majority of businesses, whether banks, law firms or whatever, cannot do business with sanctioned companies because there could be consequences for them professionally. They have been trying to extricate themselves over the last while from doing business with any Russian entity that might be sanctioned. They will not risk that. People are not seeking to get around this. My experience is they want to comply. Business cannot be done with any company that is sanctioned. I expect that number to grow in the next while as work goes on.

On cyberattacks, we have seen a number of them famously in our country. We had a cyberattack. Addressing that will require much more investment here. The Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, and the Minister, Deputy McGrath, are taking a lead and working on that. The whole issue of cyber defence is probably something we need to have a conversation about as a country. It is associated with defence, but we may not associate it with defence because defence is associated with armies and weapons as such, but these are modern weapons in terms of disabling a country's health service, as happened to us.