A Government Department in Northern Ireland has failed to spend over £400million allocated to them from the centralised leadership. The head of the department, took some time to explain why.

“We don’t understand how this is possible when every department of the government is currently underfunded. I mean: schools can’t afford head teachers, Hospitals can’t afford beds and prisons can’t afford bars to keep the prisoners in.

“When we received our money, we were gutted. Like everyone else we knew we wouldn’t have enough so we were forced to cut down on any unnecessary extravagances we made – like paid sleeping time and breaks for day time Bargain Hunt.

“However, we thought this might not be going far enough so we started getting silly. We put a toll booth on every government toilet that snapped the lid shut after 2 minutes. After two cases of shattered spines employess soon realised we were serious on the unnecessary toilet breaks they were taking. This action seemed to coincide with the development of an unpleasant smell behind the vending machine in the corner of the canteen although why this is I don’t know yet.

“We also stopped buying paper. This helped us in several ways, obviously we no longer had to pay for it as we weren’t buying it, but all that unnecessary paperwork that people moan that Government departments are always bogged down with was also eradicated within a week.

“These were one of two major breakthroughs in efficiency, however when it came to two months to go, we suddenly realised we had underspent by £800million. We were like ‘bloody hell, what the f**k are we going to do now?

“The press can’t stand it when you’ve not got enough money but they’d go livid if you had too much. But how do you spend £800million discretely in two months?

“Gambling it away on horse race outsiders was decided too risky in case one of the 100/1 outsiders came in and we found ourselves with £80billion. If that happened we really would be screwed. I think I’d have to resign if I had that much money left at the end of the year.

“In the end we invested it all in dotcom businesses. The only sure fire way you are guaranteed to lose money. Until this week it seems. We were down to a respectable deficit of -£200million when suddenly the dotcom trade picked up. We made £600million back in a week leaving us in the proverbial shit that we’re stuck in now. I even bought all staff a company Ferrari but we bought so many they started offering them to us at buy 2 get one free. They didn’t understand it when we said no.”