Appropriation Bill 2025: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2025-12-17 ============================================================ Aengus Ó Snodaigh (SF), Dublin South-Central I will speak to section 2. The point needs to be made, as I have done virtually every year, that there is no secret service and yet every year there is an Estimate set down for €2 million to be issued to a secret service that supposedly does not exist but I will come back to that. The sum of €2 million is not huge. The fact is that all of the other Estimates go before a committee. This Estimate now falls under the Minister for public expenditure. It used to be the Minister for Finance. Yet, none of the Ministers have any responsibility for the Estimate. When I have put down questions over the years, what has happened is that my questions have been ruled out of order on the basis that the Minister has no official responsibility to Dáil Éireann for this matter under Standing Order 44. One of them was to ask both the Ministers for Finance and public expenditure the funding allocated to Vote 15, which in the past was Vote 22. Since 2011 the money is returned to the Exchequer each year. They are simple things. Normally, under housekeeping rules, you have to account for the money spent. The last time I got any kind of substantial answer was when Brian Cowen held the position of Minister for Finance. He listed all of the amounts of funding given and the outrun. Nowadays, €2 million is spent and there is no accountability. He said in a reply to me in 2005 that the allocation for the secret service - Vote 12 - for the years in question was set out in a table and that it was not the practice to divulge information or explanations relating to expenditure on this Vote. I did a bit of digging and it has been practice in the past, just not recent practice, to divulge what this money is for. In 2009, it was said that the purpose of the secret service Vote was to retain the information which was necessary for the security of this country and that given the sensitivity associated with a Vote of this nature, information relating to its operation is not made public. I am not looking for a breakdown but somebody has to be accountable. It is the same as An Garda Síochána, which has an Accounting Officer. There is no Accounting Officer here. Given that a new security committee was set up, I would have thought that this would have been one of the areas that would have fallen to it, that it would have said the €2 million was agreed, that it would take the Minister at his word and that it was happy the €2 million was spent appropriately, or not. That would have been up to the members to discuss. Gay Mitchell, when he was foreign affairs Minister, asked that the Irish secret service should be monitored by a committee of the Oireachtas. It is going back over the years. If you go back to 1922, that is when the funding started. In 1927, it was £6,700. It was not a huge sum but if you look at the figures and the account of that, Mr. Ernest Blythe stated that, "The purposes of the Secret Service Vote are the obtaining of information which is requisite for the security of the country and which cannot be obtained openly." That is exactly what has been said to me in recent years. He continued that: The amounts are paid out on the order of the Minister for Finance at the request of another Minister. The Minister who is responsible for the requisition is required, at the end of the financial year, to give a certificate in the following form: [This does not happen now so far as I know.] "I hereby certify that the amount actually expended by me or under my direction for secret service in the year ended ----- was so much and that the balance in my hands on the 31st day of March was so much, and I further solemnly declare that the interests of the public service required that the payments should be made out of the Service Fund and that they were properly so made." That is the form of certificate that used to be issued and was the exact same form issued by the British secret service since 1888 when its secret service was set up in London after the IRB attacked its offices. We still continue the British tradition. However, even in Westminster there is a security committee that MI5 and MI6 are responsible to and they are held accountable in terms of funding. The amount in 1927 was £4,000 but the amount in 1922-1923 was £220,000. That is the figure that was voted and £118,000 was spent. We can guess what that was because that was the year in which the State was executing republicans as part of the Civil War. In 1923, the amount dropped to £50,000 and it continued to drop. In recent years, it has increased and in more recent years it has stayed at €2 million without going up or down in any shape or form. The question is: when will this Vote be before the Dáil or a committee so that somebody has to give even a vague account and say what it is for rather than what is happening now where it is even more secretive than before? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-17