Cybersecurity Policy
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-06
============================================================

Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow

It is a good question. Let me get a detailed note to the Deputy to fully set it out because there have been changes to this area. The decision to relocate the National Cyber Security Centre to the Department of justice is a good one. It is something I have advocated for for quite a while. There are very good people in it but I never felt it was an appropriate fit in the Department of communications because security is always an issue led by the Department of justice. The idea that some element of security would be led by a Department other than the Department of justice or Defence did not make much sense to me.
The Department and Minister for justice lead on cybersecurity and national security; that is clear. Obviously, the Defence Forces and the Garda have specific roles and they feed into the National Cyber Security Centre. Regarding command control and who the structures within the Defence Forces are to answer to, it is the normal military chain of command. At political level, we have also recently established a national security ministerial council, which I am a member of and the Taoiseach obviously chairs, as well as the Minister for justice. That enables us to bring things together at political and Government level.
I know I am over time but the Deputy asked previously, we have assigned 19 Defence Forces specialist posts to the joint cyber defence command to start this and we are also currently seeking to recruit ten civilian cyber specialists.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-11-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:05+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-06