There’s something comfortingly abstract about the cloud. An amorphous bundle of data floating somewhere above us. We upload photos to it. We download movies from it. Even as I type this there are stylised cumulus icons in several places on my desktop. The ubiquity of wifi and 5G mobile internet means that I can seamlessly stream music on my phone the whole way through my hour-long commute.
This is a far cry from my first forays into digital music, when an impatient parent unplugged the modem 15 minutes into downloading an mp3 so that they could make a call on the landline. The idea that the internet could be physically unplugged, as it so frequently (and frustratingly) was, seems almost alien now. But even though the final few metres tend to be travelled wirelessly, the internet is still at its core a series of computer applications on physical devices talking to each other through physical telecommunications infrastructure.
Off our southwest coast, a bundle of cables roughly as thick as a garden hose carries a startling proportion of those conversations at two-thirds of the speed of light between Europe and North America. Almost three-quarters of transatlantic data traffic passes through or near Irish waters, and this is important not just because of our location but also because of the centrality of digital commerce to our economy. Three companies (two of them US tech firms) account for almost half of corporation tax revenue, while data centres account for more than a fifth of all electricity usage in the country.
A Russian ship, the Yantar, appears to be particularly interested in these cables. Officially an “auxiliary general oceanographic research vessel”, the Yantar is operated by a secretive directorate of deep-sea research, GUGI, and is widely understood to carry submersibles that are capable of locating, tapping or severing cables on the seabed.
RM Block
In November 2024 she appeared in the Irish Sea about 60km east of Dublin, loitering above the cluster of pipelines and interconnectors that link us to Britain. The LÉ James Joyce was dispatched to shadow her while an Air Corps surveillance aircraft watched from above. The vessel was eventually escorted out of the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone.
A few days earlier she had been off the coast of Cork, sitting on top of a fat sheaf of transatlantic cables. In March of last year another Russian-linked ship, this one part of the so-called shadow fleet, anchored near cables off the northeast coast and had to be told to weigh anchor and leave.
Given our geography and defence budget, this is an awkward situation. Despite sitting on the edge of western Europe and hosting telecommunications infrastructure vital to the global economy, we have not invested in the capability to protect and police our waters. Ireland’s defence spending, at around 0.2 per cent of GDP, is quite meagre even compared to other neutral or formerly neutral states such as Switzerland (0.8 per cent), Austria (1.1 per cent) and Sweden (2.5 per cent).
To be very clear, I am not advocating for militarism or for any change to Ireland’s proud record of neutrality. But there are significant economic opportunities in supporting digital resilience, such as through cybersecurity and the non-belligerent protection of physical infrastructure. And there are globally significant risks in failing to act. The Government has recognised this, committing €60 million to buy underwater sonar from French manufacturer Thales.
Interestingly, Sweden ended up in a similar situation in the 1980s. In 1981, a Soviet submarine had run aground just outside a large Swedish naval base. Because it was a Whiskey-class submarine, this was dubbed the “Whiskey on the rocks” affair. Stockholm developed an understandable conviction that Soviet submarines were creeping about in its archipelagos. It invested heavily in sonar capabilities, and the subsequent discovery of previously unidentified bubbling noises seemed to confirm that suspicion.
For over a decade, Sweden tried fruitlessly to identify the responsible subs. In 1996, confused that the submarines were still active even though the Soviet Union had collapsed, they invited two biologists to listen to the recordings. It turned out that a separate team in Britain had been studying the same odd noises in herring tanks. They had given the noises a name: fast repetitive ticks, or FRTs.
Herring, it turns out, have swim bladders connected to their digestive tracts. When alarmed, or socialising in large shoals, they expel air through their back ends in rapid bursts. The result is a high-frequency buzzing that, on a hydrophone, sounds uncannily like the propulsion of a small submersible. The Swedish navy had spent years preparing for war with farting fish. The researchers shared the 2004 satirical Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery.
Who knows what our own sonar investment might uncover?
Stuart Mathieson is research manager with InterTradeIreland
