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Chapter 1: What are the national security concerns as Ireland hosts the EU presidency?
So we're getting very close to Ireland hosting the EU presidency. And one of the things that has come up about that is whether we're in a position to provide adequate national security at a time when we're going to have so many visiting dignitaries from the other 26 EU member states. particularly our supposed vulnerability to some sort of attack, maybe by Russians or by other bad actors.
Dr. Edward Burke, Assistant Professor in the History of War at UCD, joins us because he wrote about this topic in the Irish Times yesterday. Edward, thank you very much for joining us.
A pleasure, Matt.
Just actually, just to start with, can you actually explain what's meant by national security?
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.
And how well does the Irish state do that?
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.
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Chapter 2: How does Ireland's national security framework operate?
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.
Is that because we think that maybe people think that this isn't really important? Or is it that they don't understand it? Or that they think that when people talk about things like espionage and security risks, that they're really sort of talking about stuff out of spy thrillers and fiction rather than what is the reality of the situation?
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.
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Chapter 3: What vulnerabilities does Ireland face from state and non-state actors?
And I think there's still a kind of sense that Ireland is perhaps exceptional, that people have, because we are a post-colonial state, that we almost assume that others may not be interested in harming us. It's not that they're directly threatening Ireland because they are opposed to Ireland. It's because that perhaps if they hack into intellectual property, the type of
let's say, control systems, satellite technology that we work on in UCD that, let's say, some states might gain a significant military advantage from accessing that. So it's because Ireland is a leader in so many different innovative sectors that have dual use. They can be used for economic reasons, but they can also be used for military reasons that we've seen a real spike in espionage.
And of course, Ireland is also You know, it's very much on the crossroads of the global economy and communications hubs. So if you want to attack the West, then you look for sort of vulnerable points in the system. And Ireland, some states view Ireland as that vulnerable point.
Yes. Is it really, though, likely that, for example, that Russian trawlers could scrape the Irish Sea or the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland to break communication cables or power interconnectors with Europe as examples?
Oh, absolutely. It is possible.
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Chapter 4: How prepared is Ireland for potential cyber threats?
And indeed, that's exactly what the Russian Navy is attempting to prepare for, because they view it is quite likely that there will be a war against NATO in the coming years.
And therefore, if that war escalates into something just unimaginably larger and more dangerous than what we've seen in the war, the war we have in Europe at present, the war in Ukraine, and then they have to use whatever levers they can to harm, to to cause devastation to the NATO economy, not least the United States, Canada, the UK, et cetera.
And ways to do that is to cut off Atlantic communications, sort of throwing the Western economies into chaos, and then using that as extraordinary leverage to push NATO into getting what you want.
Okay, and then what about things like cybersecurity? Because we famously had a number of years back an attack on the HSE systems. Now, you could say the systems were so open that almost anyone could have gotten into them. But has there been a lot done since that to actually make them secure? And other digital systems are run by the Irish state secure from outside hacking?
Yeah, I mean, I think that some really good work has been done by Richard Brown and the people who work for him at the National Cyber Security Centre. You know, I think Ireland is more prepared, has done lots of different scenario exercises, has also worked closely with uh, NATO, uh, cyber, uh, defence excellence centres, et cetera.
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.
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Chapter 5: What incidents have raised alarms about Ireland's security?
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.
Something else I want to ask you about. There was a lot of fuss last December when drones were sighted in the flight path for the Ukrainian President Zelensky when he was coming to Dublin.
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Chapter 6: How do conflicting messages from officials affect public trust?
And a lot of concern as to where these drones have been launched from, whether it was dark ships, as there were known Russian ships in the Irish Sea. And you get so much contradiction from various politicians and officials in relation to that. You had the Minister for Defence, Helen McEntee, in the Oireachtas in February saying that a criminal investigation has been conducted.
She had no doubt that there will be a result to that. I think a lot of people would say that the result to that would be nothing will be discovered, nobody will be held accountable.
Then you also had a situation where I think you had in an Oireachtas committee, you had Professor Barry O'Sullivan, as you've written about in the Irish Times, of University College York, telling the Oireachtas committee that the Defence Forces had concluded that that a Russian dark ship was responsible for targeting Zelensky's aircraft.
But there was an interjection by the Fine Gael TD, James Gagan, that the Minister for Justice was unequivocal, that on Garda Síochána does not know, and the government does not know. Almost boasting about ignorance.
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. Unfortunately, they don't at present, or they didn't on the night in question. The Air Corps has some capacity in terms of being able to monitor
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Chapter 7: What structural improvements are needed for Ireland's security response?
the maritime space, and that's the C-295 aircraft, and that's welcome. It's a limited capacity. But I think for me, what was more worrying is that was the structural response by the state to this very serious incident. I would expect in other jurisdictions that a national security advisor, a director of intelligence who is sort of
runs the Joint Intelligence Committee that feeds into a National Security Council, that they would come up with an assessment and they would make part of that assessment public to try and reassure citizens that they are taking this seriously and they are taking reasonable steps to work with the European Commission, European partners to come to conclusions as best they can. So we haven't got that.
There is a hollow there at the middle whereby citizens are not getting clear communications And we don't have this type of structural leadership.
Dr. Edward Burke, Assistant Professor in the History of War since 1945 from UCD. Thank you very much for being with us. The last word with Life Pharmacy. Over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help. Life Pharmacy. Live better together.