Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Every year, I try to speak on the Appropriation Bill, which is usually taken in the run-up to Christmas week. With the election pending, this Bill has obviously been brought forward. Every year, the Minister's statement makes the same omission. He said the appropriation is based on the Estimates voted on during the year. There is one Estimate which I do not recall ever being voted on in the way the other Estimates are. It does not come before any committee but appears in the budget expenditure report. The Minister will know which one it is. It is Vote 15 - Secret Service. It is not a big sum of money in the context of what we are discussing and it is not enough to delay. It appears as a separate subhead and even though the Minister tried to be helpful last year and other Ministers have tried to be helpful in other years, it still has not been allocated to a Department. If it was allocated to a Department as part of a group of Estimates, so be it. Does it fit in with the Department of Defence? No, because it sits on its own. Does it fit in with the Department of Finance to maybe stop cybercrime? No. Does it sit with the Department of Justice? No. The secret service Vote in this Dáil and in previous Dáileanna sits on its own. It had a different number previously. It was Vote 15 in recent years and I cannot remember what number it was before that.

This anomaly needs to be addressed. It is obviously not going to be addressed in this Dáil but it should be addressed in a future Dáil, in that the Minister should just allocate it to where it is appropriate. I have never sought information on the exact amount of funding. It is a small amount of money. If it goes to the area on which people say, on the quiet, it is spent on, then so be it. If it is the amount that is spent on securing and protecting the services of the State in the way other countries do that, it is a minuscule amount. It is not about the funding. The figure was even lower and has stayed constant for the past ten years in my memory.

People have laughed at this and said, "Oh yeah, the secret service", and I have sometimes been quite flippant about it but there is no secret service. It is not like we are in Britain, where MI5 is answerable to a committee of Parliament in some ways. We do not have that mechanism but maybe we should have it. That has been a discussion in the background in the Dáil in recent years, especially with regard to cybercrime and so on. Maybe there is a need for greater disaster planning and planning for how to tackle what we saw when the HSE computers went down. If that is what is meant here, then so be it.

The only thing I could find is Ireland's Secret Service in England. I have a copy of the book here. It is from 1924. It does not address a secret service organisation. Edward Brady wrote the book, which is about activities engaged in Britain from 1919 to 1921 by those who were acting under the authority of Michael Collins. I do not know whether that organisation continued. As far as I know, the IRB disappeared. There is no secret service, to my knowledge. There is an organisation within the Defence Forces, J2, which comes under the Defence Forces Vote and deals with intelligence. It is not a secret service. It is open and answerable to the military authorities, as are those within An Garda Síochána who are involved in the area of surveillance.

This is an anomaly. I will not labour the point. I will deal with other issues when we reach Committee Stage.

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