Tánaiste Micheál Martin has visited Kerry’s Valentia Island for a subsea cable security conference.
The inaugural “Subsea Cable Security and Resilience Symposium” is being hosted by the Valentia Transatlantic Cable Station Foundation.
The event runs at the Valentia Island transatlantic cable station until Saturday, October 12th, and involves 85 representatives from ten countries.
The organisers state that “growing digital dependencies as well as recent geopolitical tensions and the concurrent climate crisis have placed the topic of critical infrastructure protection at the top of policy, industry and research agendas”.
“This includes subsea telecommunications cables, across which over 99 percent of transcontinental data traffic transits and upon which countries across the globe increasingly rely as they continue to digitally transform their economies and societies,”they state.
Delegates will discuss papers ranging from history to geopolitics to technology to security and resilience, with topics such as “Cable Protection in Cold War Strategic Thinking”; “Responding to threats to undersea cables”; “Subsea Cable Resilience in the Caribbean”; “Operating in a Heightened Geopolitical Context”; and “Subsea cable incidents: data collection, reporting and response”.
The Valentia Transatlantic Cable Foundation said it was “proud to host this not-for-profit event at the place from where the first transatlantic cable was laid over 150 years ago”.
The event is run in collaboration with a team of Irish and international researchers as well as global industry representatives, with the support of AquaComms, Ireland’s Departments of Foreign Affairs and Defence, the IDA, Aurora, Philip Lee, Analysys Mason and the European Subsea Cables Association (ESCA).