Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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Not yet, anyway.

One of the take-home points I took from the presentation this morning was that cybercrime has now overtaken the illicit drugs trade worldwide. I thought that was very alarming. It gives some context to where everything is at. This is a form of attack. Our country has been under attack for the last week and a half. It is a new form of warfare, where a country is laid siege to by another entity. I want to ask a question that has not come up so far. It concerns me that it is going to take us, as a nation, five to ten years to get to full capacity to fight back against cyberattacks. In that time, things will have shifted hugely. We may get to the finish point and yet find that the whole world has changed in that interim period.

The other thing that struck me was that this form of attack is, as I said, a form of warfare, but we are a neutral country, militarily. However, when it comes to cyberattacks, this is a global problem. I put the following question to the panel. Do we really need to go so far to create our own competency to fight cybercrime, knowing that other countries spend far more than us and knowing that their systems are far more advanced than ours? Is this something where we should cede some of our cyberneutrality and ask another country or entity that has a greater capacity to fight this off to support us in that regard?

This happens very often in the military sense, where countries build alliances. Ireland is small. Our capacity will take five to ten years to build. Our neighbours in Britain spend ten times more than us per head of population fighting cybercrime. I would like to ask Mr. Larkin whether there a logic and any precedent in terms of other countries leading in respect of the fight back in this regard.