Professor Donna O'Shea:

We need more spending on cybersecurity. There is a request for that. We also need to be able to track spending in cybersecurity by developing a standard classification system for cybersecurity in Ireland and across the EU. There is a challenge in that because cybersecurity is never considered its own discipline. It is considered to be part of the ICT domain. When organisations track spending on cybersecurity it is grouped into a category of information, communication and technology investment. It is hard to track. At a country or government level, it is also hard to track because sometimes a spend in cybersecurity is tracked as a percentage of GDP on defence. Ireland does not do that but some countries use the ITU index and other countries use other indexes to track spending on cybersecurity. There is no common framework for tracking spending. However, if we are serious about spending, we should track it. That is the point I wanted to add to Mr. Larkin's request.