EU Presidency
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-16
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Helen McEntee (FG), Meath East

As the Deputy rightly said, over the past number of years, we have seen changing types of threats or challenges that we had not faced previously. Maritime security is to the fore in that regard. As a country, our maritime domain is seven times the size of our landmass. It is really important that where we have such a large number of critical subsea cables, energy infrastructure, and gas infrastructure quite literally on our seabed, we have the equipment to identify where there are risks and where there are threats and if issues emerge, how we can respond to them. That is where the Deputy will see a huge amount of our focus lie during our Presidency.
The strategy sets out how we will ensure there is a greater situational awareness of what is happening in our maritime domain. That requires investing in our capability - in our own ships, helicopters and technology and equipment - to be able to identify what is happening above and below the sea. It is about making sure we strengthen our partnerships. Of course, we will be looking to our neighbours in that regard, namely, the UK and France, but beyond that as well. There is a number of different programmes, the Joint Expeditionary Force, JEF, being one of them, which is a programme looking at maritime security for a lot of the north Atlantic countries.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:17+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-16