There are some State secrets that ought not to be revealed. They are too awful. I have referred previously, as seen HERE, to the impracticality of returning to the Oireachtas to find out what meaning was intended in any particular piece of legislation.
The impracticality is even worse, if it is proposed to return to a member of the Oireachtas to ask the member what he/she meant. The utterances of members are recorded (this can be seen in the televised proceedings on RTE). Then they are supposedly transcribed into a written record of what was said.
What actually happens is that a team of civil servants re-writes, polishes, and re-formulates what the member said. The effect is to make the member appear to have been speaking received english (and therefore, capable of doing so; a dubious proposition in many cases).
This fraud is not peculiar to Ireland; see HERE for an instance in the House of Commons.
It is interesting to compare recordings of Oireachtas report with the ‘official’ Dail record, particularly when certain North Dublin politicos were conversing. Hollywood moguls would kill for such an efficient and effective rewrite team (Joe Esterhaz, where are you now?)
[...] that much-abused word. Whether it’s pointing out that NAMA is illegal under EU legislation or pointing out that what you read in a Dail transcript is not what was actually said in the Dail on th…, they always manage to quietly, without much fuss, drop a mental hand grenade on the conference [...]