James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Chief of Staff and his colleagues. It is a great privilege to have them all with us today. As my colleague, Deputy Clarke, has said, I thank the Chief of Staff on my own behalf and that of colleagues for hosting our visits to the Curragh, Haulbowline and a number of other sites over the past couple of years. As a Kildare representative, I am particularly pleased with the operation that the Chief of Staff continues to run at the Curragh in County Kildare, elsewhere and in Baldonnel. Long may that continue.

I have some questions for the Chief of Staff. He mentioned in his opening statement the commission on the future of the Defence Forces and how this is an exciting time. I entirely agree with him that this is an exciting time. It is also a great opportunity for the Defence Forces to ramp up and avail of the support that has been offered by the Government to regenerate and create modern Defence Forces. I have a particular interest in more modern forms of warfare or more modern forms of attack or defence. I am talking about a hybrid. We know about conventional warfare but we, as a committee, have heard evidence about subsea cables and interception or certainly observance of those surveillance techniques off the Atlantic coast.

Drone warfare is in the news at the moment. Whether used by hobbyists or hostile nations or entities, drones are an issue. On telecommunications in general, outside the subsea cables, data centres, data farms, our connectivity is at the heart of our sovereignty in terms of how we manage and resource ourselves as a State. There is an economic imperative that we maintain our connectivity to the wider world and safeguard the data we manage on behalf of so many others, not least commercially. On cyber defences, I refer to the whole information and disinformation piece. There is quite a bit there, that is just a quick snapshot. On the modernisation of the Defence Forces that the witnesses envisage and on which I share their excitement, what do the new, modern, regenerated Defence Forces look like? I refer particularly to hybrid threats and ramping up to meet those challenges in the future.

We talk about numbers. Some of those numbers can be simplistic in terms of what the headcount should be. Where do the witnesses see the Forces target and what would be the distribution across the different arms of the Defence Forces, land air and sea and also across the new hybrid, cyber type threats I have mentioned? My late grand-uncle served in the Defence Forces in the Congo and elsewhere on some of the early UN missions. There is a great, proud history there of the Defence Forces which is shared by members of my own family. I thank our guests for all they and their colleagues do.