Buried deep in Mr McCreevy's text is the stuff about the bounty hunters. The Government wants to encourage these individuals, and has quadrupled the bounty paid out. Any time after January they could come riding into town, a-whoopin' and a-hollerin', refusing to go back home until they get their cash.
The Minister didn't dwell on this, of course; just a terse, three-line statement: "To mark the Millennium, the Centenarians' Bounty in the year 2000 will be £2,000. This will cost an additional £177,000 in 2000."
While this is listed as a "special measure to mark the millennium", the Government offers no explanation of how it intends to reduce the bounty after next year. Viewers of westerns will be sceptical - once these rough centenarian bounty hunter types get used to a few dollars more, no one will have the courage to take it back.
Mr McCreevy dropped the kid-gloves approach, however, when it came to his own Civil Service. First he issued a general, open threat to Dublin's car-park perk set, promising to introduce a benefit-in-kind charge for car parking spaces provided free of charge by companies.
He added: "I asked the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners to undertake a review and come up with a fair and workable system. "Surprisingly, the working group has not been successful so far in resolving the issues involved."
Could this be a less-than-cryptic reference to the fact that many civil servants themselves benefit from free parking in central Dublin?
Then there was the list of deserving, if at times perplexing, causes.
The good old Office of Public Works gets £2.5 million for "certain capital works"; the Birr Telescope gets £267,000; Galway's Terryland Wood project gets £100,000; and there's £100,000 for the Gerard Manly Hopkins summer school.
For some reason the budget for Partnership for Peace is reported in two separate sections; there's £920,000 listed for "running costs", and then, later, another £562,000 for "office accommodation costs".
But at least the Minister came through one more time with that hoary old budget gag. Squeezed between the budget for the State Laboratory and the Attorney General's office is the £735,000 listed as "Secret Service". What is that cash for? No one will say - it's a secret.