The Irish chapter of the ISSA was launched with a public meeting in the Davenport hotel on 26 February 2003.

The meeting was opened by Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister for State at the Department of the Taoiseach, with special responsibility for the Information Society. Minister Hanafin spoke about the importance of information security to the development of the information society in Ireland. She welcomed the development of the Irish ISSA chapter and expressed the hope that the chapter might enhance public confidence in the security of online systems. Her speech included a comment that the electronic voting system in the Dáil had been disabled that day by a computer virus. This aspect of her speech was widely reported, as you can see on our press page.

A copy of the Ministers prepared speech is available on her website.

The Minister was followed by our chapter President, Mr Paddy Roberts. Paddy introduced the organisation and gave a brief summary of our work on the formation of an Irish chapter. His speech covered the history of the organisation, the reasons for the development of an Irish chapter, and our aims and ambitions for the chapter. We were especially pleased that the Minister took the time to open our meeting, as the Dáil was sitting that evening and she took time out from her duties as government Chief Whip.

The guest speaker for the meeting was Mr Winn Schwartau, of Interpact. Winn addressed the meeting on the topic of insider threats, which is of course a subject close to all of our hearts as security professionals. Winn is always an extremely entertaining speaker, and certainly kept our audience engaged throughout his speech - this may have been due in part to his very generously and violently handing out copies of his books. Winn was delighted with the audience reaction, and particularly with the level of participation and questions.

We were delighted with the turnout for this first event. We had planned for 100 attendees, which we felt was ambitious given that the ISSA is completely new to Ireland, and that the meeting was being held mid-week and outside of office hours. It quickly became clear that we had a far larger crowd than expected, and we were grateful to the Davenport for providing an additional 30 - 40 seats on very short notice. While we realise that not all of our audience were full-time security professionals, we feel this turnout is a clear indication of the increased interest in security in this country. Perhaps more importantly than the crowd during the meeting was the number of people who remained at the bar after the meeting - a clear endorsement of our aims in the networking and information sharing areas.