Mr. Cian FitzGerald:

I will respond to Deputy Carthy's point. I know he is no longer with us, but I will answer his question regarding Sweden as the model. The reason Sweden was chosen as the model as part of our research was it was a participating member of the Commission on the Defence Forces. It had already been identified as a comparative country by the Irish authorities. Second, the reason we chose Sweden's Total Defence document was that at the time, Sweden was a neutral European country. It had a similar-sized defence force, it had a similar outlook towards defence and its foreign policy and, therefore, it provided a workable template that we could draw on to augment our response to these types of threats. These were the primary reasons Sweden was chosen as a model.

Regarding the specific ways in which we could augment our intelligence capacities, one of the ways would be through the use of defence attachés, as was mentioned by the Commission on the Defence Forces. Relatively strategically placed defence attachés in major metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C. and London would allow us to tap into existing defence attaché networks to leave us better informed of the types of threats that are out there. This would enable us to make better and more rapid decisions, and provide policymakers with better information.

An additional element that we could also examine is greater collaboration with the EU Intelligence Centre, which is going to be augmented as part of the EU strategic compass implementation plan. That also provides an opportunity for us not only to collaborate on an EU project, but also to have greater intelligence sharing with our fellow member states.

Regarding the methodology for our approach, ultimately it is about looking at how we make best use of the limited resources at our disposal. We kind of know what the defence budget is going to look like over the next period, so it is about how we make use of these resources. That is why the approach we took was trying to make best use of existing frameworks, or augmenting their use. These include the €2,400 grant that exists, which maybe leads me to stay with this €2,400 grant. Overall, the approach we would like to look at with this grant is changing the way in which we approach it. It has been approached from an environmental perspective and how we enable Ireland to reach its climate targets. What we are trying to highlight is that there is an additional consideration here. It also has a national security consideration and it could be either promoted among the general public, or more resourcing could be provided.

As Dr. Colfer said, there is also a potential vulnerability where in a scenario, if it were to happen, that only a certain segment of society had electricity while another segment did not, and the dividing line was economic circumstance, that would leave Ireland more open to disinformation campaigns. These would continue to sow social division, and would continue to undermine trust in public institutions. As Dr. Colfer said, these grey zone techniques are designed to operate within the cognitive domain. It is designed to operate within people's minds, and to undermine confidence in the State's ability to protect its citizens. In turn, that constrains that State's ability to respond to the external pressures being placed by revisionist states, such as the Russian Federation. We have seen this with their misinformation campaigns in the United States' elections.

This draws me to the question around misinformation in elections. One of the key ways of countering this, and sometimes these solutions are quite simple, is media literary courses. We can expand them, run them in schools and make sure that people are able to identify misinformation, report that it is misinformation, or are simply able to decide in their own minds what is and is not disinformation, or to know what is true and what is not true. That would be a key and easy win for Government, if it just expanded its media literacy programmes. They are in existence. I hope that has captured all of the questions.