Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his words. I share his view that the real concern is for the patients in our health system. He is absolutely right to focus on their needs at this moment. They should be reassured that there is no shortage of resources, international or local. There is a lot of expertise in this area in the country. Many of the companies and others with that expertise have offered to help and are engaging with the Department of Health at the front line clearing out and restoring the systems. We have contracted extensive international expertise and have further experts ready to deploy should there be a further incident or a need to scale up the operation. There is no shortage of resources but, unfortunately, it is a painstaking task. The task is to find the malware in each part of the network and obliterate it. It is a matter of using agents on the network to find it quickly and of checking to make sure the network is secure as we bring it back up again. That, unfortunately, takes time. The key project in the Department of Health is getting the networks back up and running for the patients.

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