Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach and other Government spokespersons have repeatedly justified the review, to use the language they tend to use, of our neutrality in terms of the threat of cyberattacks. Is that a bit of a ruse, given that they are not looking at the lessons of the biggest cyberattack that happened here on 14 May 2021? Far from suggesting that we should abandon neutrality, or whether this has anything to do with neutrality or our Defence Forces, it is suggested the biggest cyberattack we witnessed was due to the lack of a state-of-the-art, up-to-date computer system in our health service which allowed patient information and corporate documents to be taken. This is connected to the crisis more generally in the health service. Something which has been repeated to me by many healthcare workers is that the ancient and inadequate nature of the computer technology in our health service is the real problem. I am not saying there is no cybersecurity threat but if we do not have decent computer technology and IT systems in places like the health service, not only are we vulnerable to those kinds of attacks but this is also a significant part of the crisis we are facing in terms of health services generally.

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