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

The role of the National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC, is to support Departments and other public bodies to improve the resilience and security of their IT systems to better protect services upon which people rely and their data. The NCSC has a number of vital functions, including co-ordinating the response to large-scale cybersecurity incidents; supporting public sector bodies and critical national infrastructure to safeguard their systems and mitigate cyber risks; and sharing advice and guidance on cyber threats with its constituents and the wider community.

The NCSC avails of external export support, as required, including a number of third-party incident response services. It also engages, on an ongoing basis, with relevant partner agencies in the EU, as well as in the US and the UK. In July 2021, on foot of memorandum for the Government, the Government agreed to implement a number of capacity-building measures in the NCSC. The overall full-time staffing complement of the NCSC will also be increased to at least 70 over the coming five years, with 20 additional staff to be recruited by the end of this year, bringing the serving complement to 45.

In addition to the creation of 20 new permanent posts in the NCSC, a cybersecurity graduate training programme was initiated last year, with four computer science graduates to be recruited each year on contracts for a three-year duration. Currently, there are 29 staff members in the NCSC, the highest level of staffing since its establishment.

See this speech in context