Mr. Conor King:

CIS officers or cyber experts are people who basically keep the lights on but also have our cybersecurity as their primary role. We have had an anomaly in our establishment for a number of years now, which can be traced it back ten or 15 years but it needs to be addressed, whereby approximately one third to one half of all our CIS technical officers who are technically qualified and doing technical jobs are receiving technical pay. That is simply because of an inadequate establishment. That has been made clear in submissions by RACO to the Public Service Pay Commission, PSPC, the high-level implementation plan for the PSPC and to the Commission on the Defence Forces. However, those recommendations and submissions have not been heeded. The consequence of that is a very high attrition rate of technical officers in the CIS corps. It is quite simple. It costs a nice bit of money to qualify and train a cyber expert. They will find multiples of their salary in the private sector. We need to spend a little bit to save a lot in that regard. It is a glaring anomaly that has not been addressed and really needs to be addressed. We know the value of cybersecurity. We have experienced attacks on our HSE. We know that hybrid threats are everywhere with regard to cybersecurity and we cannot be complacent. It starts with valuing and retaining the experts we have within our staff.