There was an interesting discussion on Broadsheet following my last post on the battle to bring the expense claims of TDs and Senators out into the open. You can read a selection of the comments here

One of the things on which questions were raised was this idea that something could be “quietly” introduced in the Dáil, without journalists or politicians even really noticing what was happening.

And some suggested this was not an accurate description of what had happened.

“If it went through the Dáil, it wan’t quietly introduced, it just probably wasn’t noticed,” said one poster, and maybe that’s a point.

So, I thought it would be worth a look back to see just how long it did take to change the rules so that politicians could keep their expenses secret.

And the answer was … all of seventeen seconds. Scroll to around 4:12.26 on the day (blink and you will miss it, well almost).

Notice the way this happened “without debate”. You can watch the edited clip via my Twitter account here

And so you see this big long descriptive account of what happened, as we would read it on the Oireachtas website (via kildarestreet.com) – none of that detail was made public.