Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The imposition of fines, penalties or absences from the House for that is irrelevant and absurd. The information that we are trying or pretending to try to keep confidential is undoubtedly going to leak out to the press sooner or later. I will give a recent example. We were all told that a highly sensitive document that had come to the Committee of Public Accounts, of which the Minister of State and I were both members at one time, should not appear anywhere.

I am referring to the Ansbacher case in which people were wrongly named. That document had only been released for approximately 30 minutes before it was all over the media and the Internet and was in the newspapers the next day. Politicians do not keep secrets. To impose a cosmetic penalty on them, which will apparently be the case under this Bill, will not be effective. It is only a fig leaf. It would be better were the information readily available in its raw form instead of in a spun way, as it undoubtedly will be, that would probably affect the inquiry more adversely than were it to be released initially.

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