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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