Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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I thank our guests. The Chairman has said that Mr. Ruutu has quite properly made a very high-level presentation to us. We want to drill down more into the nitty-gritty and specifics. Our opening view is that, as a committee, we very strongly agree with President von der Leyen's statement that cybersecurity is one of the pressing issues because external actors have the capacity to paralyse industrial plants, city administrations and, as we know very clearly in Ireland, health systems. The cyberattack on our health system in the middle of a pandemic was an extraordinarily impactive and damaging assault on our public administration that actually caused deaths.

In particular terms, I would be interested to hear, from the European Union perspective and in a collegiate way, what we can do in responding to attacks like that. Is there a focus on the nations which we know host such cyberattackers or is it entirely a diplomatic effort that is left to the external action focus of the European Union? How do we better prepare ourselves for the future? Preparing resilience within our systems is one thing but how do we actively ensure that those who attack us are discouraged from doing so?

Will the witnesses explain the differences between cybersecurity and cyberdefence? What are the features of each of them?

As active parliamentarians, most of us are particularly concerned about cyber interference in our democracy. We see this in other jurisdictions. We have certainly seen it in the United States in recent elections and I have no doubt there are active participants across Europe also. Does this form part of the European Defence Agency's focus? What does Mr. Ruutu have to say on that?