Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for taking this matter. He will be aware that in May of this year, we had a ransomware attack on our health services. It was the largest known attack on a health service anywhere in the world. For this to happen to any health service is frankly disgraceful, but it is particularly disgraceful as we battle a pandemic. Credit is due to the IT staff who tried as quickly as possible to restore the systems in place. There was undoubtedly a considerable cost. While it is easy to measure the direct IT cost, and I am interested in hearing those figures, there is a broader cost in terms of the impact that the cyberattack had on health procedures. At the time, approximately 7,000 patient appointments were delayed each day as a result of the attack. That has consequences for all of those individuals and their families. Quite frankly, it was a terrorist attack. It is something that unfortunately we are going to see much more of. It is where the new battleground is going to be. Sadly, we are going to see state actors engaged to a far greater extent behind some of these cyberattacks.

This week, Grant Thornton Ireland published a report which estimated that the economic cost of cybercrime in Ireland last year was approximately €9.6 billion. That has very serious consequences for the economy. Obviously, an attack on something like our health services has serious impacts on people's lives. This time it was the health service, but I am worried that next time it could be water services or local authorities. An attack on our infrastructure has very serious consequences. I hope the Government has a strategy in place to prevent this happening not just within the health service but across all areas of critical infrastructure and indeed infrastructure more widely.

It is time to look at the broader question of how we address cybercrime and cyberterrorism. It is essential that we co-operate with our EU partners and indeed as part of the permanent structured co-operation, PESCO, because this is a matter of national security and defence.This constitutes an attack on the State, and as a State we must respond. We are not capable of simply responding on our own. We must respond with fellow democracies to some of these attacks. I hope the Minister of State can respond to my queries about the infrastructure that needs to be put in place here at a domestic level, but given that this is a matter of national defence and security, I believe we should also be taking part in some of the PESCO groups that are designed to combat cybercrime and cyberterrorism. This is where the wars and battles of the future are going to be fought. Earlier this year, Ireland had a salutary lesson that our systems are not up to scratch. I hope that the Government has in place a system so that if we experience a similar attack, we can address it.