Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 7 July 2021
104. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science the amount and share of the State expenditure on research and development spending in the area of cyber security since 2016, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [30808/21]
View answerResearch projects often encompass a multitude of subjects, and are funded by multiple sources including public, private and European funding. At present it is not possible to determine an exact figure for R&D expenditure across the system on this specific area. My Department is progressing a standard classification system for public expenditure on research for Ireland, which is intended to provide greater system-level monitoring, management and impact assessment.
Having said that, it is understood that there is currently a lot of activity in this area. There are over 6,000 people working in the cyber security industry in Ireland. Over 30,000 professionals in Ireland have cyber security related skills and six of the top ten global cyber security software companies are located in Ireland.
With respect to my Department’s agencies, since 2016, the Irish Research Council has funded eight awards in the area of cybersecurity at a total cost of €674,000 across several of its programmes.
There are currently 16 SFI Research Centres, three of which are particularly focused on those areas of technology relevant to cyber security. They are:
- Lero, the SFI Research Centre for Software, hosted at the University of Limerick
- Connect, SFI Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications
- Insight, SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics
Each of these Centres are heavily networked and collaborate with other cyber security experts around the world.
The SFI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and the SFI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Training will ensure that students have the technical skills required to innovate at the cutting edge of AI, that they are prepared to deal with the ethical challenges posed by the technology, and can work seamlessly in team-based industrial settings. This important investment will equip our companies and public sector with the skills we need to protect us from risks associated with cybercrime.
The majority of Science Foundation Ireland investment in research related to cyber security has been through the SFI Research Centres Programme and the SFI Centres for Research Training. Investments have been made in the SFI Industry Fellowship Programme, SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme and the SFI Spokes Programme. The total active SFI investment (i.e., those awards that have commenced and research is being undertaken) between 2016 and present in those research projects that are working in areas of strong relevance to cybersecurity is in the region of €291m. It is important to state that this does not mean that the full amount of this investment is 100% focused on cybersecurity research – this is particularly the case for SFI Research Centres.
In November 2018, Cyber Ireland, the national cyber security cluster was established with funding from IDA Ireland and support from Cork IT (now Munster Technological University). IDA Ireland also provides grant support directly to its clients as part of its mandate to increase the scale, value and impact of company R&D (including in cyber security) activities, in Ireland.
Enterprise Ireland’s Technology Gateway Programme provides business development resources to the TUs and IoTs to help them interact with industry on a local, regional and national basis in order to develop and manage new RDI projects which IoTs have the capability to deliver on. The Walton Institute (formerly TSSG) and Nimbus are both working in the Cybersecurity area. Under the Technology Gateway / Technology Centre Capital Call 2021, funding of €247,424 euro was provided for a Cyber Range at NIMBUS in MTU Cork. A Cyber Range is specifically used to test the robustness of systems to cyber-attacks.
CeADAR, Ireland’s Technology Centre for applied AI, is also currently working on a demonstrator project in cybersecurity.
