Irish Examiner view: Urgent need to invest in public health

Government must learn the lessons of the last year and develop robust strategies against long lockdowns, among other pressing issues

For “public health to operate effectively, it has to be locally-based, it has to be well connected with communities… with county councils, or city or town councils”, the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group has said. Photo:Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos Dublin

Those who warned that we would see more cyberattacks were proven correct all too quickly with news yesterday that the Department of Health was hit by a ransomware attack similar to the one that struck the HSE last Friday.

The department, like the HSE last week, shut down its systems as the National Cyber Security Centre teamed with gardaí, the Defence Forces, and Europol to investigate the kind of breach that is increasingly common in our interconnected world. Indeed, it is telling that the language of cybercrime takes inspiration from the oil industry because the ‘mining’ and ‘extracting’ of data has become as lucrative, if not more, than that valuable resource.