Recent Cyberattack and its Impact on the Health System: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2021-05-18
============================================================

Ossian Smyth (GP), Dún Laoghaire

I want to deal with the question of who is in charge. Of course, somebody has to be in charge. This is a criminal investigation, it is a crime scene, and the Garda is in charge of the investigation. At the same time, the National Cyber Security Centre has a statutory role in incident response. It is a European directive so when there is a cybersecurity incident, they are the people who go in to assist and they bring in outside contractors. However, it is the HSE's IT staff who have the absolute knowledge to be able to rebuild the systems as they are the best skilled to know their own systems. That is the chain of command. It requires an all-of-government response. In this case, we have the Department of Health, the Department of Justice and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications involved, and co-ordination from the Department of the Taoiseach.

---

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/2021-05-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:17+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-05-18