Dr. Edward Burke

And there's a lot of good cooperation with other European countries on how to deal with sort of even, you know, category one type critical incidents whereby a significant parts of our digital infrastructure is undermined, including in the public sphere, such as HSE.

So there has been a lot of good work there, but we don't have a sickness intelligence service.

And, and that is, that means that you don't just prepare it to be attacked.

You don't sort of just try and, you know, act as the sort of mechanic after the crash.

But you also sort of, if necessary, take on your adversary.

If there is good reason to believe that, let's say, a foreign state, perhaps an entity that is operating from Russia and perhaps has links with Russian intelligence,

is trying to do things which are very harmful to the EU's economy and EU communications.

And Ireland won't simply sort of prepare for the incident when it happens, but would actually take active measures to try and intercept, deter, and even sort of in a defensive way, harm that adversary in terms of their capabilities, in terms of trying to sort of provide cyber deterrence and defence.

So it's a contest.

And we don't really have that type of legislation and capacity to redo that.

We don't have a signals intelligence service, which is kind of a government or military agency that's responsible for intercepting and processing and analysing electronic emissions, but also sort of pushing back against cyber attacks and taking active measures.

And we're still a long way from that.

And the defence forces in terms of their signals intelligence is a pretty low capacity

And simply the guards are more involved in sort of looking at computer crime.

So in my view, we need a standalone signals intelligence for a country that has such an oversized sort of tech economy, not to have the type of capacity that New Zealand has or Norway has.

It seems to me to be a really significant gap in our state infrastructure.

Yeah, I think that's deeply worrying for our European partners.

The fact that we don't have the capacity to come and we don't have the processes to come up with our own assessment as best we can, at least sort of putting an assessment out there instead of this really sort of conflicting messages and leaks that are coming out from various parts of the public infrastructure.

So I think that is very worrying.

I mean, it's also worrying that we had naval vessels that had sophisticated radar.