Undersea cables off the coast of Ireland are not sufficiently protected, Minister for Health and former junior minister for defence Jennifer Carroll-MacNeill has said.
Ms Carroll-MacNeill, speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, said Ireland has two very significant gas pipelines coming from the UK that are essential for the State’s critical infrastructure
“While there’s some resilience in the cables, if one is caught, there are others that can cover it, that is much less the case with the gas pipelines,” Ms Carroll-MacNeill said.
“It has been the case that we have had shadow fleets of different nations having accidental anchor drives, making themselves known in the Baltics, for example, [and] around the North Sea.
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“The world has changed dramatically in the last three years. And these are risks that I suppose we didn’t feel that we faced before then. I certainly, as junior defence minister, called for a very significant expansion in our defence budget.”
Her comments come after US senator Jim Risch, who chairs the US Senate foreign relations committee, called on Ireland to increase its defence spending to ensure the protection of the undersea cables.
“Ireland must increase its defence spending to safeguard vital undersea cables from our shared enemies,” the Republican Senator for Idaho said in a statement to RTÉ News.
“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.”
Last year, a report published by the Parliamentary Budget Office detailed that the Department of Defence underspent its allocation from government by more than €220 million since 2012.
This figure included an estimated €15.7 million underspend in 2023, following a commitment from government to increase defence spending by 50 per cent by 2028.
Ms Carroll-MacNeill said Tánaiste and Minister for Defence Simon Harris takes the issue “extremely seriously”.
“We need to essentially double our spending on defence, and that is not to make us change our neutrality. As a neutral country you should in fact spend more on defence, not less on defence, simply as a matter of logic. And we don’t, we need to have more people in our Defence Forces,” she said.
“We have the money to pay their salaries, but we struggle to recruit more and more. And over the last number of years, particularly in a full economy, when there are so many other opportunities available to people. But we need to spend more.”
Ms Carroll-MacNeill said the State needs to take defence seriously “as a critical infrastructure”.
“The rest of Europe is facing cyber and hybrid attacks, particularly Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, of various different kinds. Just because of our geography does not mean that we are immune to that. And 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,” she said.
