Dublin MEP Barry Andrews recently wrote to Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan asking whether anyone was screening the 14,000 Russian citizens granted Irish visas since the invasion of Ukraine for hostile intelligence activity.
It was an inadvertent way of asking whether Ireland has a counter-espionage function. The answer – in effect, no – suggests our front door is not merely unguarded, but left open with the keys still in it.
Detection therefore falls to what happens after an agent is already inside – a scenario the country has had ample opportunity to rehearse: a Russian agent of influence alleged in the Oireachtas though never proven nor entirely discounted; a British asset alleged at the top of government back in 2022; and a GRU officer or Russian spy who was revealed in 2023 as having taken an actual Trinity degree under a false identity in 2018.
These claims now arrive with a regularity that suggests they will keep arriving; and given this is the national paper of record, it seems the right place to set down, for the benefit of the citizenry and in the absence of any formal mechanism, the procedure to be followed.
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Step one: announce the allegation of infiltration. This will be done by a newspaper such as The Irish Times, since there is no other route by which it can arrive.
Of course, this is not a defect of the State, but the architecture of the State itself; with the press being the only institution in the Irish system with both the capacity to investigate a claim of foreign governmental penetration and any observable appetite for doing so.
For more than a century, the Republic has subtly yet overtly delegated its counter-espionage function to whichever mainstream reporter gets there first.
[ Security gaps leave Ireland vulnerable to foreign intelligence. The State is underprepared ]
Step two: identify the authority that will investigate the claims. Ah, here you meet your first difficulty. There is a directorate of military intelligence inside the Defence Forces, but it operates with almost no legislative basis and no meaningful oversight, which in any case doesn’t matter because it cannot investigate a politician. There is a security unit inside An Garda Síochána that can, but it’s simultaneously responsible for organised crime, so is kept more than arm’s length away from Leinster House.
There is a National Security Analysis Centre that analyses intelligence, but strangely without collecting any. There is no separate foreign intelligence service at all and no dedicated counter-intelligence agency, which is the body you were probably actually looking for. This particular arrangement is unique in Europe. Ireland did not arrive at it by accident but by avoiding the subject, with incredible persistence, for more than 100 years.
[ These Irish State agencies use password software with deep links to a Russian tech firm ]
Step three: refer the matter to the parliamentary oversight committee urgently. Oh wait, there isn’t one – or at least no dedicated statutory one.
Which is strange given almost every comparable democracy maintains an intelligence and security committee for precisely this reason: a small, permanent body of security-vetted political illuminati who meet behind closed doors and take classified evidence from the intelligence services under oath, in order to summon the heads of those services and their ministers to account for specific operations.
The Oireachtas instead created a Committee on Defence and National Security, which does the heavy-lifting on budget estimates, but is rarely, if ever, given a confidential briefing on an actual threat, given the strange lack of a security clearance regime or legal gateway for giving it one.
Step four: watch the accused clear themselves. Curiously, this is the only step at which Ireland has developed an institutional competence. When it was reported in 2024 that an unnamed Russian agent was installed somewhere in the Oireachtas, members stood up in the chambers one after another to self-declare that they were not him, while Eamon Ryan even suggested the man be publicly named, so that suspicion would not fall upon the entire house.
The house, lacking any capable body of clearing the situation up, cleared itself by oath; a medieval procedure the courts of our nearest neighbour got around to abolishing in 1833.
Step five: consider what this hands to our adversaries. A state that can’t establish that a claim is true, also can’t establish that it is false.
And herein lies the elegance of the Irish system working against itself: a foreign intelligence service wishing to completely paralyse the Irish parliament doesn’t need to actually recruit anybody at all; it only needs to allege that it has, before watching the legislature attempt to prove a negative in a country that has abolished the means of proving anything.
In this manner, a foreign state hiring an actual agent would be an extravagant cost, especially seeing as the rumour of one alone does all the damage.
Step six: for allegations concerning Britain, see Appendix A.
Appendix A: The 2022 claim by the Irish News that a British asset was at the top of the Irish Government for three decades culminated in the following: one call for an investigation, multiple refusals to comment by the political parties and silence since.
This is because the apparatus required to answer any question of foreign control of Ireland’s political puppeteering is precisely the apparatus we refuse to create, as possessing it feels too much like becoming the state that once pitted military agents against us. So the rejection of the creation for the very mechanism that is meant to prove our independence is the reason it can never be proven.
Confused? Go back to Step one.
