Dr. Edward Burke

A pleasure, Matt.

National security has taken on a comprehensive definition of means sort of harnessing the various levers of the state to ensure that both the physical and the economic and the digital security of citizens and state infrastructure is protected.

So it's both it encompasses not only the public sphere, such as government departments, government communications, but also it entails protecting the interests and the privacy and the rights of

Irish citizens from illegal exploitation, particularly from both state and non-state actors.

I think we have some very committed, determined, and resourceful people who work in Angharadís Uí Chona and Security Intelligence, who work in the Irish Military Intelligence Service, who work for the National Cyber Security Centre.

I think they work extremely hard.

But I think they have very limited resources, both in terms of the powers that they've been granted by legislation, the actual resources they have in terms of the amount of people they have, the budgets that they have, compared to the threats that they face from both from state espionage, but also

non-state extremist groups as well who operate within Ireland.

So I think they do a lot at the operational level.

I think a significant problem in Ireland is that we don't have a security culture

particularly at parliamentary level, so we don't have an intelligence security committee, we don't have a national vetting system which even allows our intelligence officers to speak candidly to parliamentarians because they don't know precisely who's secure and who's not secure because they haven't gone through this type of developed vetting process which is

prominent in many other European states as a means of informing a security dialogue between Parliament, between politicians and those who are in the operational space.

Yeah, I think there's a range of reasons.

First of all, that I think there was an assumption that intelligence was done to us rather than us being involved in that space.

And that relates back to the

the troubles on this island and a perception of dirty tricks and intelligence being a bad word.

On the other hand, of course, there was a very significant counter-subversion operations on this island by Angarda Seacona and the defence forces.

But that was done in a very sort of, I would say, ad hoc and a way that was not acknowledged by the state in terms of the extent of it because of the political sensitivity of cooperating with the UK

when it came to counter-subversion and counter-terrorism during the Troubles era.

So it was a preference to kind of keep it out away from Parliament rather than away from formal structures and place it in informal structures.