Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the fact the Minister of State intends to remove from the section the reference to "public order", which is a step forward, and every step forward, no matter how small, is to be welcomed.

Regarding amendment No. 29, I do not accept the Minister of State’s reasoning. If the vendor is based outside the jurisdiction, it can still be contacted, and if it does not reply in time, that is the problem of the vendor, perhaps because it is precluded by distance and is selling something far away.

Nevertheless, I welcome the fact the Minister of State is seeking to remove the reference to "public order" in line 22 of page 24 such that the provision will be limited to national security. It is difficult to envisage circumstances where this matter would arise, although perhaps banning a Huawei component could lead to riots on the streets. I do not know. Deputy Ó Murchú rightly made the point it is all well and good to label something as a high-risk component, but are we going to be able to replace a component that comes from the good guys?

It seems this Bill is about good guys and bad guys, and we all have preconceived notions about who is who in that regard. That is my concern. National security apparatuses certainly work under the idea that there are good guys and bad guys and that there are states the information from which we receive is solid and reliable, along with their military hardware – I suppose we are moving in that direction generally - and other states whose information is not solid or reliable. Our officials travel to conferences in the capital cities of some of those states and meet their counterpart employees of the security apparatuses of those states and, therefore, we think they are the good guys.

I am not convinced, however, that there are good guys in the world of international espionage. I do not think any information we receive in regard to national security is going to come from the Phoenix Park. Rather, I think it will come from an embassy in either the Phoenix Park, Ballsbridge or somewhere like that. My concern is that there is so little scrutiny. I accept that the scrutiny of measures taken on the basis of national security is always going to be difficult, but that does not mean there should be no scrutiny, yet I fear that is, effectively, what the Minister of State is introducing. It is a mechanism by which the assertions of other states are going to be taken as read, and nobody will be in a position to say otherwise.

I accept that the Chinese are developing this and I have my doubts about them because the Americans told us we should do, but it would be naive to think that only China and Chinese companies are interested in espionage and in compromising the security of networks to their advantage.

I would have thought the American security apparatus or the British, French, Russian, Indian or Pakistani security apparatus - name your pick of any big power - would not be doing its job unless it felt it could compromise networks and get the information it needs out of them. The argument the Minister of State is making is that we have the rule of law in some states and the law is at least more robust in some states than in others. We have seen that in action over the past two years where, ironically, people can be brought before the Houses on Capitol Hill and made answer very awkward questions. Indeed, Zuckerberg was brought in and very awkward questions were asked in the House of Commons about some of the information for sale that was gleaned from Facebook and how that came about. While we accept these countries are not likely to be deemed as high-risk vendors because they have a robust rule of law and accountability structure, we are saying we should have no accountability structure whatsoever for these Houses, with no orders to be made, nothing to be set out and no way to challenge anything. We are saying it would be dangerous for us to even know what is being done because it would fry our little minds and we should leave it to the House. We trust the elected representatives of the American and British people to hold to account companies operating in their jurisdictions and make sure they are safe, we are going to just rely, carte blanche, on what they tell us. That is a fundamental problem I have with this Bill. It is one I have articulated previously to little avail, although at least the reference to "public order" has been taken out. Sometimes in this place, one stands over the very small successes.

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