Professor Brigid Laffan:

Regarding why we should not be complacent, core Irish economic interests are at stake here. We store so much data that we cannot afford to have a major incident affecting a multinational investment in Ireland. We also need to consider our own critical infrastructure. It is very important that it is now in the public domain and in the political domain with the consultative forum coming up. We need to realise that while geography is important, it is not everything.

Regarding online disinformation, as our educational systems evolve and develop it is important to have adequate media literacy and communications literacy. We also need to develop critical thinking. New knowledge comes so quickly now that the capacity to think critically is probably one of the skills that we need now and more so in the future.

The Deputy asked if the EU is a great power. It is an economic power, but in my view, it is never likely to be a scaled-up version of a nation state, a big federal system. That is not in prospect. The concept that I am developing in my own work is the EU as a collective power. That is the power to get things done, to be resilient and to respond - the power with the member states. Through Brexit, the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has shown it can be a collective power. Given the world we live in now, another step change is required. Europe should not want to be tethered to Washington with everything that Washington decides somehow becoming European foreign policy. Equally with China, there is a battle royal going on at the moment on China policy, on de-risking and not decoupling. The EU needs to manage to have enough agency and space to be its own player in the world.

I chaired an event in Brussels last night with Commissioner Borrell and his argument was that the EU needs to be a player, rather than a plaything, and needs to learn the language of power. For an awful long time, the EU wanted the world to be like the EU, but that is not the world in which we live. Much is happening at present - with implications for Ireland - that we need to scan, keep abreast of, influence and shape.