US Senator Jim Risch's call on Ireland to increase defense spending has been backed by TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill.
“Ireland must increase its defense spending to safeguard vital undersea cables from our shared enemies,” the Republican Senator for Idaho said in a statement to RTÉ News on Wednesday, February 19.
“Ireland serves as a gateway for the information pathways and critical infrastructure linking Europe and the United States.
“With this strategic position comes significant responsibility to address the very real threats to it – we’ve already seen attacks on subsea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan Strait.”
Senator Risch is the Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which leads US foreign policy legislation.
According to RTÉ News, about 97% of the world’s communications and Internet traffic travels through a network of undersea fiber-optic cables - three quarters of those cables in the northern hemisphere pass through, or are close to, Ireland.
In October, during the previous Government, Ireland's Department of Defence announced that Budget 2025 includes a record allocation of €1.35 billion in defense funding.
"The record Budget funding will facilitate significant progress on important defence projects, including military radar, subsea awareness, force protection equipment, and Defence Forces infrastructure," the Department said at the time.
Not long after the Budget announcement, Brian Honan, the chairman of Cyber Ireland, told the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications that "Ireland is particularly at risk because we host so many data centres," adding that Ireland hosts one-third of the EU's data.
"We can become a collateral target if somebody, either a nation state, cyber criminal or politically motivated person, decides to attack an entity based in Ireland," Honan said.
"This would not necessarily be an Irish entity or an Irish Government body. It could be a foreign company hosting its data here.
"If a party tried to attack that, it could lead to collateral damage to us.
"The issue of cybersecurity spreads across a number of areas, including defense, justice, and industry. We need similar oversight in all of these areas.
"The fact that we lack national security strategy is a big weakness.
"How can we align a national cybersecurity strategy with a national security strategy if no national security strategy is in place?"
More recently, Taoiseach Micheál Martin told The Irish Examiner this month that capital expenditure in defense would increase in the next two to three years and that this would include a primary radar system, which is currently in the tendering process.
He said cyber and maritime security, including subsea cables, are “two areas that there are huge vulnerabilities across Europe” and Ireland has to “up our game on that,” as well as strengthen the navy and military.
Responding to the US Senator's statement on Wednesday, TD Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, Ireland's Minister for Health who served as Minister for State with responsibility for European Affairs and Defence in the previous Government, told RTÉ's Morning Ireland that she thinks Irish defense spending should be 'essentially doubled.'
She said that in her role as junior Defence Minister, she called for "a very significant expansion in our defense budget."
"We need to essentially double our spending on defense and that is not to change our neutrality," she said.
She added: "As a neutral country, you should in fact spend more on defense, not less on defense, simply as a matter of logic and we don't."
She continued: "We need to take defense seriously as critical infrastructure.
"The rest of Europe is facing cyber and hybrid attacks ... our geography does not mean that we are immune to that.
"I think it's important that we really feel that solidarity with our European family, our European friends, the attacks that they're facing could just as easily happen here and we should be alive to the risk."
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