In all the hullabaloo and cuts yesterday, one government agency escaped unscathed; the Irish Secret Service.
Hold on, you’re telling me we have a team of Jimmy Bonds working to protect us?
Not exactly. Unsurprisingly information on them is hard to come by but they have a budget of €1million a year to do whatever they do.
That’s a lot of exploding pens and microfilm recorders.
It is but it seems that our Secret Service is not really comparable at all with MI6 and the lads in the CIA.
So no Q or M or any other cool code names?
No, not as far as we know anyway. It seems they don’t even have an office as such. The money is essentially a resource used by both Army Intelligence and Garda Intelligence to dip into for stuff they need for undercover operations.
Intriguing, go on.
From what we could find out from the guy in the trenchcoat and the pink carnation in our local park, the money is used to pay informants during the course of investigations. The Gardai and Army would find this sort of stuff hard to budget for so they use this fund when they need to grease some palms.
Jaysus, who knew?
Very few it seems. The last thing to go on the record about them, aside from their yearly budget handout was an official at the Public Accounts Committee in 2008 who said: “Imagine that the money is used to pay for information in the interests of the service of the State, rather than the supply of bullet-proof cars.”
Still, they must have waded through a fair few Euros in the build up to the visit of Obama and the Queen this year, making sure it all went well.
If they did, they got the info on the cheap. From last year’s budget of €1million, they only spent €450,000 but they were awarded the full whack again this year, probably the only area in the entire country that wasn’t cut.
It’s all who you know or what you know I suppose.
Indeed. And if anyone does know a few secrets, it will be lads in charge of this fund.
So all these years of whispering to strangers in toilets that “the red squirrel is in the oak tree” was all for nothing.
Sadly it was. You should probably stop doing that.
