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Comment
editI have removed the reference to the implicit recognition of the Third Dáil status for the following reasons:
- The presence, absence or numbering of Hansard style records is unrelated to official thinking on the legitimacy of the body itself - the UK Parliament had no official record for most of its existence.
- The official website of Dáil Éireann does not exactly duplicate the organisation of the printed Official Report in its tables of content.
- The numbering of the Official Report has more to do with the technical production of printed and bound volumes than official thinking as to the status of the Dáil.
To take the last point first, historically Volumes have not covered a fixed period of time, or a fixed volume of business. Instead the decision to start a new volume and print a bound version of the completed volume seems to have been rather arbitrary until recent times. As a result some Volumes were printed in A and B sections to keep within manageable size, while other volumes are relatively slim.
In addition account must be taken of the Gazettes. Firstly, the Official Gazette of the First Dáil, in which (according to the Official Report itself) the Official Report of the public sessions were to be published and made available for sale. Also Iris Oifigiúil which replaced the Dublin Gazette on 31st January, 1922, during the Second Dáil, as a result of the Adaption of Enactments Act, 1922 (I don't know whether this contained the Official Report of the Second Dáil, but it seems a likely candidate).
Bound volumes of the Official Report for the first two Dála were not produced until much later, after the practice of producing bound volumes of the Official Report was well established. A volume was produced for the First Dáil, one for the Treaty Debate, one for the public sessions of the Second Dáil (both before and after but not including the Treaty Debate) and one for the private sessions of the Second Dáil. If I remember correctly, of these volumes, the Treaty Debate volume was actually produced first, with the other volumes produced some time later.
A further complication is that private sessions of the First and Second Dála, prior to the Treaty Debate, are not in Hansard form but rather in Minute form.
And that brings me to my second bulleted point. The official website aims to provide a date ordered table of contents. To do this for the Second Dáil in particular its combines multiple bound volumes into logical volumes. Speaking as one involved in this decision, it was decided that the timeline of the debates as they switched between public and private sessions was more important that the physical bound volume in which the session had been published.
Attempting to infer "implicit recognition" of anything from this would be a mistake, and particularly so when compared to the status of Acts of the First and Second Dáil in Saorstát Éireann.
Féar Éireann: I've replied to our respective changes on my talk page.Andrew L 01:35, 11 November 2005 (UTC)