Mr. Robert Watt:

There are a few aspects in that. There is the overall resilience of the network, as government networks in Ireland and elsewhere are subject to periodic attacks and we must ensure the systems are resilient, robust and can repel those attacks. We do not speak about this too much in public but it happens and at times they can be quite frequent. Through Mr. Barry Lowry, the Government Chief Information Officer, and colleagues we have a cybersecurity group and we continue to invest and challenge the system ourselves to ensure it is robust. It is an ongoing challenge.

There is also the question of data protection, which is part of what the Deputy has mentioned. It concerns unauthorised access to data or inadvertent leaks, which can happen.

Every so often one will read in the newspapers about people who have been sacked from Departments, generally from the Revenue Commissioners or the Department of Social Protection, for accessing files they should not access. That reflects the robustness of the system. If one is not authorised to look into somebody's files, the system will identify that and an alert will go out. We have good systems but no system is perfect and we have to continually update and prepare ourselves because the world moves on and changes. In terms of electronic files and access, however, the IT systems are much more secure than the old days of going down to the registry and taking out the file and so on, whereby one might have signed in that he or she took out a file or not. The IT system does not lie. If one accesses a file, it will identify it on the system, whereas in the old days it was much easier to access a paper file. It is much harder to access an electronic version of somebody's file without that being authorised and without it being discovered by the system. They are robust in many ways but the fact that people have more data and files in an electronic format, that increases the risk of more significant breaches. It is something we are investing in all the time and we partner with various bodies to help us with that.