Taoiseach announces First Meeting of New Government Security Committee

An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar has announced that the first meeting of the new Government Security Committee will take place next week.

The announcement followed the successful conclusion of a Garda security exercise today in the Docklands area.

“Protecting our citizens is of paramount importance to the Government. This involves a significant amount of ongoing work by the Gardaí, the Defence Forces and other State agencies.

“Today’s security exercise is part of the ongoing work by these State agencies to practice, develop and assess our capacity to prevent or respond to incidents. Their principle focus is on security within Ireland, but they also work with our partners in Europe and further afield. Much of this work happens behind the scenes, but I also recognise that the public need reassurances about our capacity to deal with incidents.

“As well as testing our response capacity, it is even more important that we do all we can to prevent attacks. We do this through our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, through international co-operation, through our foreign policy and peacekeeping work, and also through important domestic measures such as promoting integration, education, tolerance and respect here at home.

“Before I was elected Taoiseach, I said it was my intention to establish a new Government Security Committee to allow greater Ministerial involvement in preparing for and managing major security threats, and to allow more extensive cross-Departmental cooperation on these issues.

“I intend to hold the first meeting of that Committee next week, when we will have an initial reflection on all of these issues and review the lessons learned from today's exercise.”

An Taoiseach also emphasised that there is no change to the threat level here in Ireland, which remains at Moderate.

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