Government Asks Households to Prepare While National Security Strategy Remains Missing
Household preparedness is reasonable. What is unreasonable is asking citizens to prepare for strategic threats without telling them what the State itself believes those threats are, who is responsible for addressing them, and what level of disruption citizens should realistically expect. Joseph Dillon gives his Volter View.
The Government is asking Irish families to plan for potential threats. It should also explain what it is doing to prepare the country for them. More than two million Irish households are this week receiving the Government’s Be Emergency Ready booklet, encouraging them to make a plan for emergency situations. Families are advised, for example, to keep adequate supplies of food and water, maintain alternative means of communication and to discuss with neighbours how to manage emergency situations. This is all ostensibly sensible - it is difficult to object to keeping a torch and some bottled water under the sink. The guidance is so generic though that, but for a vague reference to cyber threats, it could have been published at almost any point in the history of the State. The only meaningful takeaway, although not explicitly stated, is that in certain circumstances households should not expect immediate or adequate assistance from the State, and should be ready to fend for themselves for a time.
This is not necessarily an indictment of government callousness – even wealthy states cannot prevent every emergency, nor should they pretend they can. Indeed, the EU acknowledges as much. It is encouraging resiliency in Member States’ national security and emergency planning through its preparedness union strategy, and is monitoring observance of obligations under its Critical Entities Resilience (CER) directive.
The galling thing about the Irish government’s approach, though, is both where they draw the line between public and private responsibility for preparedness, and its lack of transparency about its threat assessments. People can reasonably prepare for a storm, a flood or a prolonged power cut, but how exactly is the average Irish family supposed to plan for “cyber attacks and disruptions to critical supply chains”, as listed in the document? These are national security issues, not household-level contingencies. The public can accept that the government cannot control the weather and occasional disruptions are to be expected, especially as the impact of climate change is worsening. But cyber-attacks and attacks on critical infrastructure and supply chains are not natural phenomena. The impression this document gives is that hostile actors are as difficult to predict and as impossible to deter as bad weather.
To be fair, the Government has some measures in place. In 2020 it released a civil defence plan Towards 2030 which defined roles and capabilities for non-geopolitical emergencies, and it also released in 2026 the National Strategy on the Resilience of Critical Entities 2026–2029. These are useful pieces of the preparedness architecture, but neither answers the questions raised by the Be Emergency Ready campaign. If the State is preparing for cyber-attacks and disruptions to critical supply chains, what does it believe the threats actually are? Who might cause them? What capabilities does Ireland need to prevent, withstand and respond to them?
These are national security questions. They require more than sporadic, unconnected plans for individual sectors, but rather a coherent assessment of the strategic environment in which all sectors and levels of society operate, and proactive policy responses. A National Security Strategy should provide precisely that framework, and in every other EU member state it does – Ireland is the only exception. An overarching national security strategy provides an assessment of likely threats, identifies the capabilities required to address them, and sets national priorities for budgeting and the use of political capital. Without it, individual preparedness measures risk becoming an incoherent collection of responses without a unifying understanding of the problems they are intended to address.
Ireland has been waiting for such a strategy for years. Following the 2015 White Paper on Defence Government announced in 2019 the development of the first National Security Strategy for the State to cover the period 2020–2025. COVID-19 and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine were cited as reasons for prolonged delays. Five years after the original deadline, and despite repeated calls from experts, industry, and the Oireachtas to ensure its urgent prioritisation, the strategy remains missing.
This is the absurdity of the Be Emergency Ready campaign. The Government is asking households to make a plan for what happens when normality breaks down, while the State itself has yet to transparently articulate its own thinking about what could cause that breakdown, what it intends to do about it, and what risks it is prepared to accept. If preparedness is sensible for an individual household, it is difficult to explain why it should not be the organising principle of national security policy.
The answer to these questions cannot simply be to keep three days’ worth of dry food and a battery-powered radio on the shelf. Those are sensible measures for citizens because there are limits to what any State can guarantee. But when the Government asks people to prepare for cyber-attacks, disrupted supply chains and other threats arising from an increasingly unstable international environment, it owes them far more than a checklist of generic tips.