Professor Brigid Laffan:

I thank the committee for the invitation to be here to participate in these deliberations. The last time I spoke at this committee, it was not the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, just foreign affairs. That is an important development with regard to the parliamentary accountability for those very important areas. It is also important that I emphasise to members that I do not consider myself a specialist on defence and security. I have spent 40 years of my academic career working on the European Union and on the dynamic of European integration, and that is the perspective I can bring here. However, it is not possible to analyse the EU today or where it is going without due recognition of the shifts and shocks in global politics and that so much of the future of the EU will be determined by forces outside of Europe and how Europe responds to those forces. In that context, security has ratcheted up the agenda of the EU in that the Foreign Affairs Council is meeting much more frequently together with defence ministers, and there is also the institutionalisation of meetings involving the Foreign Affairs Council and the chiefs of staff of the armed forces of member states. There is no doubt there has been a sea change within the EU regarding the centrality of security, broadly defined.

When looking at the shifts and shocks in global politics, the first is obviously the ending of the geopolitical holiday in the world. It was possible, after 1989 and the collapse of communism, to think that the singular US hegemon would bring order and security to the world, but that is not the case. We now live in a world of great power competition, and how that works out will have major implications for the EU and, inevitably, for Ireland. Obviously, the balance between competition and co-operation in the relationship between the US and China is very important. However, what we can certainly say is that the unipolar world is over. We now live in a multipolar world where the rules-based international order is much weaker and under threat, and we do not know what kind of pole the EU can be or what it will achieve in the next phase or, in other words, where it places itself in this world order or disorder.

The second momentous development has been the return of war to the European Continent with the invasion of Ukraine. It is really important we grasp the impact or importance of this because this is the first time there has been an interstate war in Europe since the Second World War. It is the first time that a country has invaded another with the express intention of taking its sovereignty and overwhelming its culture. Prior to the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and then the broader war, the Russian state engaged in multiple subversive activities against Ukraine, including every element of cyber threat. At least now in Europe, for the EU, the war in Ukraine has shattered any pervasive complacency that Europe's security and way of life is assured. It should also shatter any complacency on this island.

The hardening of geopolitics poses immense dilemmas for the EU, because the EU is largely driven, or was historically, by the management of economic interdependence. To have to suddenly confront the changing security landscape is a challenge for the EU but also for all of the members states.

Mr. Olaf Schultz, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany was not wrong when he said that this was a zeitenwende, a transformative phase. It is that important. We must situate any discussion on hybrid threats and disinformation in the context of this very different security landscape and very different political dynamic that we now find ourselves in, in Europe. Obviously there has been a transaltantic response to what has happened in Ukraine, but a very strong battles of narratives about the war is going on within Europe. It is also within the transatlantic area but also, more importantly, with the global self. I hesitate to use that phrase because I dislike the term.

Concern for hybrid threats and disinformation is not new but of course it accelerates with all of the new communications tools. Digitalisation and developments in computational capacity mean that hybrid threats can vary, they can morph into different things, and they are essentially designed to go below the radar and to have plausible deniability. In other words, to be able to say "not us". So they are difficult to detect and it is difficult to see who is at fault and who is to blame. We should be under no illusion that the purpose of hybrid threat is to undermine. These threats are usually perpetrated by non-democratic states against democratic states and open societies are particularly vulnerable precisely because of the strength of the openness. The intention is always to undermine the institutions of a state or of a group of states, and to potentially undermine its economy, elements of the political system, public administration, and also critical infrastructure. Disinformation is part of the hybrid toolkit. It is the most visible element in terms of the manipulation, information warfare and all of that.

There is no doubt that addressing hybrid threats and disinformation is very high on the EU and NATO agendas and on the agendas of the member states today. We see in the EU response to all of this that the EU responds as it does to everything. It starts by institutionalising. It puts in place structures to begin to think about the problem. It goes into problem-solving mode. From around 2016 onwards the EU set up the EU Hybrid Fusion Cell within the European External Action Service. It then created strategic communication capabilities to counteract disinformation and as already mentioned established the European Centre for Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki. That is a network-type organisation to bring best practice, practitioners and academics, shared experience, training and new ideas. It is also a forum for EU and NATO co-operation.

We have to ask ourselves why it took Ireland until January 2023 to become a member of this centre of excellence. It was initiated in 2016 and copperfastened in 2017 with 16 states. There are now 33 states and Ireland was either number 32 or 33 to join. We have to ask ourselves why it took Ireland so long to join a centre of excellence for hybrid threat. In the EU strategic compass a whole set of the strategic compass deals with hybrid threats and is developing what they call the hybrid toolkit to look at all of the countermeasures and to develop new ones. Within the EU Council of Ministers system there is now a working party on enhancing resilience and countering hybrid threats. That is where national officials link into the council system which in turn goes up the hierarchy to ministerial council level. Therefore a lot of work is being done in the European Commission, in the European External Action Service, EEAS, and in the European Council.

There are countries that are much more active than we are in this space. Finland was mentioned. If one wants to look at a country that for sound geographical reasons inevitably takes security very seriously then we should look no further than the Finns. Finland was one of the few countries that continued to focus on territorial defence and on all potential threats after 1989. What is happening in the Arctic is interesting, and again this is something that I do not think we are conscious of here. Every country north of Ireland is involved in the Arctic and I do not think it crosses our horizon.

I will finish with two questions. How active and embedded is Ireland in all of these different elements of institutionalisation? Is Ireland's system, at domestic level, sufficiently co-ordinated with clear tasks in different Departments to feed into this? Do we know, for example, who the contact points are in these various elements? What relationship do we envisage to NATO activities in this sphere, particularly in terms of critical infrastructure and the much-identified undersea cables that we hear an awful lot about now? I thank the committee.