Ireland guards the world’s data with two ships and a very good camera
Most of us picture the Internet as something that lives in the air when in fact it lives on the seabed, tucked away in a few dozen fibre-optic cables about as thick as a garden hose. Roughly 75% of the ones crossing the Atlantic pass through or near Irish waters. Add in the plethora of data centres housed here (which swallowed 23% of the State’s electricity last year) and a solid fact emerges: Ireland is one of the most important places on Earth for the movement and storage of data.
A new paper from the Institute of International and European Affairs, produced with Vodafone, sets out to make us notice this. Its title, Secure Connections, is drier than its contents deserve because the argument underneath is genuinely alarming. It says that we have become indispensable to European connectivity at the precise moment that connectivity has become a target.
In November of last year the Yantar, a Russian ‘research vessel’ that Western intelligence agencies say is built for surveilling and cutting subsea cables, sailed into Ireland’s economic zone, pointed lasers at RAF pilots, and reportedly launched drones. It was back again this year, escorted away by the LÉ James Joyce in the middle of the night. In March, Iranian drones struck Amazon data centres in the UAE, and suddenly millions of people couldn’t pay for a taxi or check their bank balance. The report’s point is that data centres and cables are not neutral infrastructure: they have become targets for attack.
Which brings us to the awkward bit the paper is too polite to dwell on. The fact is, Ireland claims a maritime zone that is a whopping 13 times its landmass. To patrol it, our naval service has eight ships and, on a good day – by the estimate of a former Defence Forces officer – it only has the crews to float three or four of them and for much of this year it only managed one. The two newest vessels bought to patrol the Irish Sea sit tied up in Cork for want of people to sail them; a quarter of a billion euro in State assets, basically idle. We have invested in radar and sonar, but as one academic in the report noted, these are sensing technologies, not defensive ones. They can tell you who severed the cable but they can’t stop the cable being severed.
The report’s remedies are sensible and mostly bureaucratic: a security-clearance system so the State and industry can actually share intelligence, faster planning, a “resilience tax credit” to help operators pay for it all. That last suggestion, it’s worth noting, is from a report co-funded by a telecoms company recommending public money for telecoms companies – sound enough, but you’d want to spot the interest. Besides which, the deeper problem is harder to expense: you can’t subsidise your way out of not having a navy.
Take the incident last year when a Russian submarine surfaced off Cork Harbour. Irish ships couldn’t track it due to lack of sonar so the British flew in a helicopter to do the job for us. That’s the reality beneath the 75% statistic: we host the data on which a continent depends, and when something goes bump in our own waters, we ring the neighbours. The cables are ours but the reality is that the capacity to defend them is borrowed.
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