Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I turn to the realm of cybersecurity. It is good that progress is being made on the National Cyber Security Centre with an operational window for full opening of spring 2024. The last time this came up before the committee, we spoke about a certain amount of cybercrime is domestic in origin. There was the infamous attack on the HSE systems, which came from overseas. How much collaboration is there between the Department, its counterparts overseas, and other Departments? Within the European Union we should surely be leaning on big brother, the European Union mothership. We saw during the Covid epidemic how well we were able to work with other health departments and ministries overseas. It should surely be the same with cybercrime. We should be trying to work on a collaborative competency to be more robust. Having our own agency is important, but it is quite minor in comparison with what France and Germany would have. How much collaboration is there on a pan-European basis?