Three-quarters of all subsea cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters, but who is responsible for protecting this crucial continental infrastructure and how vital is for Ireland?
Around 97 percent of the world's communications and internet traffic travels through a network of undersea fiber-optic cables. Almost ten trillion euro worth of financial transactions moves through it every day.
"We cannot ignore the particular vulnerabilities posed to energy and communications infrastructure, across Europe, and most especially in the waters of the North Atlantic, close to our shores," Tánaiste Micheál Martin said as recently as May. "If we look at the European Union and we look at the United States, that interconnection, which Ireland finds itself pretty much at the centre of, is a very significant in these global transactions."
"There needs to be patrols on all sorts of maritime activity, fisheries and undersea infrastructure," he said.The Irish Naval Service struggles currently to staff the small number vessels is has available to it for maritime patrols. We need your consent to load this comcast-player contentWe use comcast-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
EEZs are areas in which individual countries have internationally-recognised rights to conduct certain activities in the sea area, but do not give any power of access to those areas."In and around Ireland's EEZ we had Russian registered commercial vessels loitering around there. It only takes a couple of rusty ships with ship repair equipment to actually cut these cables. They're very, very weak and vulnerable and feeble in many ways," Mr McNamara said.
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