SiliconRepublic.com stopped off in Kilkenny for Cyber Ireland National Conference 2026, where we talked to a number of attendees from across the industry.
On Tuesday (22 September), Cyber Ireland held its fifth annual national cybersecurity conference to explore the most important trends and updates within the contemporary cyber sector.
The Cyber Ireland National Conference (CINC) 2026 saw a variety of cybersecurity professionals and leaders gather at the Lyrath Estate in Kilkenny to discuss and examine topics such as the global cyberthreat landscape, cyber innovation, the development of a cyber-ready workforce and emerging security risks associated with AI.
SMEs, multinationals and individual experts alike all gathered at the event, which was sponsored by organisations such as Enterprise Ireland, TrendAI, Integrity360, IDA Ireland, Munster Technological University, Intel and Centripetal, among many more. Ireland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and KPMG were headline sponsors of the event.
As well as featuring a number of keynotes and panel discussions, a key goal of the event was to facilitate expertise and knowledge exchange among the attendees.
This kind of engagement was particularly noted by Loman McCaffrey, Integrity360’s director of business development for Ireland, when speaking to SiliconRepublic.com at the conference.
“Everyone is engaged, everyone seems to have come with some challenges in mind,” he said.
“People use [CINC] as their one outing of the year to gather some information, to come back to the team, their boss, to the board with ‘here’s the direction of travel we need to be on’. Some events are a little bit more ‘a day out from the office’ – this isn’t that.
“This is people coming to do their research, figure out what others are doing.”
Small state, important position
The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Realising Ireland’s Cyber Industry Potential’, with a number of talks focused on Ireland’s importance in the European space, and how the country can scale its cyber resilience and capabilities to become a global player in the domain.
For Ian Fahey, managing director at KPMG, the scene was set for this year’s CINC by NCSC director Richard Browne in his opening keynote, ‘Cybersecurity State of the Nation Address’, where he “introduced Ireland as a small state on the edge of Europe, who is also leading the overall security capability for the European state”.
“We’re hosting vast amounts of data, we’re hosting and managing the fibre interconnectors between Ireland and mainland Europe and the US,” said Fahey.
“Lots of key critical infrastructure items are being hosted or driven out of Ireland and that brings a certain responsibility, and I think Ireland as a nation is stepping up to that.”
The conference took place at a vital time, with Ireland currently in the middle of hosting its EU Presidency – which also brings heightened cyber risk with it.
Eoin Byrne, cluster manager at Cyber Ireland, noted that it’s become clear through the Presidency that Ireland has a “very strong seat at the table” in Europe.
However, he emphasised that the country also has a “critical role to play in securing Europe’s digital economy” due to factors such as hosting numerous multinational tech and pharma companies, the transatlantic data cables running through our waters, and hosting an estimated 30pc of the EU’s data.
Fahey echoed the important role Ireland plays in EU digital resilience, stating that it brings “different pressures” but also “an imaginative mindset”, noting that some of the vendors at CINC were on “the leading edge” of tech solutions.
“That’s kind of positioned us to be a real strength and a real leader in terms of cybersecurity,” he said. “[The EU Presidency] has obviously brought a different focus to Ireland. The threat landscape changes, it naturally follows the Presidency of the EU.
“Ireland as a whole has held up really well, and what it has really reinforced is that the cyberthreat landscape is borderless and our response … also has to be borderless.”
‘Get the basics right’
With the topic of cyber resilience, especially in an Irish context, top of mind at CINC 2026, we asked a number of attendees about what Irish businesses need to do to stay secure in the ever-evolving threat landscape.
Eadaoin McArthur, a Cortex and cloud specialist at Palo Alto Networks, pointed to staff education as key to staying secure.
McArthur said that businesses can bolster their defences by “ensuring that their staff are moving at the speed that the threat landscape is evolving, and ensuring that organisations have the incentives and mandates in place and that they’re addressing them in a timely manner”.
She added: “Most organisations going forward will be forced to have an AI mandate to ensure that their organisations are capable to protect against the speed and velocity at which cyberattacks are occurring.”
Fahey emphasised that the most important step for Irish organisations is to “get the basics right”.
“Sort out your basic cyber hygiene before you start addressing all of these really sophisticated attacks,” he advised.
Fiona Griffin, a solutions engineer at TrendAI, agreed, and also added that Irish organisations need to keep an eye on AI.
“Getting the basics right – hygiene, patching – but also really just being aware of AI out there,” said Griffin. “Taking it seriously, making sure you’re compliant, making sure that you’re aware of the latest threats that are out there, and what’s Ireland doing in terms of compliance.”
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