Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

These are very significant developments that have taken place. Regarding the need to develop a national maritime security strategy, the waters over which we have exclusive economic authority are about seven times larger than the land mass of this country, so we have to have a better understanding and better security structures in place regarding that. This is why we are leading on the national maritime security strategy. We ran a public consultation over the summer and received about 300 responses. I expect to receive the national maritime security strategy by the end of the year. That is another key step in terms of the security of our country.

Regarding the common information sharing exchange, the Deputy is correct in saying that I took the decision for the Defence Forces to opt in to this. This basically a sharing system for when we become aware of something in our waters. A lot of this would have happened on an ad hoc basis in the past as good relations are already in place, but we need to better co-ordinate information when we see something in our seas that can move into somebody else's seas. We are seeing more and more of this happening. We are seeing more and more bad actors in this space. This system provides us with an exchange to co-ordinate that information sharing and is working well.

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