I hope no one ever asks Bertie Ahern to set anything down in black and white - it would be bound to come up a murky grey.
And this would be funny, the kind of quirk on which Mr Ahern has built his reputation as a man of the people, but for the doubt it raises about where he stands on two critical issues.
One is the business of cleaning the mess his predecessors have made of public life in the Republic.
The other is the completion of the Belfast Agreement, which was never meant to leave us with what Mr Ahern himself called an armed peace - the condition that Sinn Fein, the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries obviously want.
Both issues are crucial to the survival of democracy, in this State and in the island as a whole. In neither case can we afford ambiguity, especially among those who devise public policy and lead public opinion. But ambiguity is the Taoiseach's stock in trade.
For instance, since his first response to Tom Gilmartin's claim about meetings with ministers, Mr Ahern has offered several versions of what happened and it seems that if needs be will provide as many more.
As he told Ruairi Quinn in the Dail on Wednesday: "If I come across any inaccuracies or matters which I believe are in conflict with my record here last week I will . . . make them available to the House."
Within reason, of course: "If what I say leads to people ringing Mr Gilmartin and he says X, Y or Z, or if someone rings him and says A, B and C, I will be here for the rest of my life. And I will not do that."
The Taoiseach has learned from experience. This is the man who was treed by Ray Burke in north Dublin and packed poor Dermot Ahern off to London with a single, gormless question for the Murphys of JMSE.
Rosencrantz came home empty-handed and his leader climbed down from his tree with Fianna Fail's usual version of what he'd found: the truth, the half-truth and whatever you're having yourself.
Some who defend or excuse the Taoiseach now say the Burke and Haughey affairs are all in the past, in another country, and, besides, the careers of Mr Burke and Mr Haughey are dead.
Others feign surprise, as if those involved were the only people who knew what was happening, at local level on the planning front, or on a more elevated plane in Mr Haughey's case.
Both are wrong. Planning scandals on the scale now coming to light had their origins in the housing shortages, land prices and rezoning practices of the 1960s.
Land prices had risen by 530 per cent (compared with a 64 per cent increase in the cost of living) between 1963 and 1971. In one case, the value of a few acres went up by 900 per cent overnight when it was rezoned.
A young minister for local government, Bobby Molloy, set up a committee to investigate in 1971. Its report, bearing the name of the chairman, Mr Justice John Kenny, was published on January 26th, 1974.
It ran to 195 foolscap pages and explored 12 possibilities, including nationalisation, before recommending a scheme which amounted to a form of price control.
The argument about Kenny has a familiar ring. On the day the committee was set up the judge said its recommendations must accord with the rights of private property in the Constitution.
And, in a sense, that was the beginning and the end of it.
If the argument is familiar so are some of the personnel: Mr Burke was even then an influential, not to say controversial, member of Dublin County Council. (One of his contemporaries was its youngest chairman, John Boland of Fine Gael.)
It's odd to think that, only 18 months ago, Mr Ahern was still climbing the trees of north Dublin to make sure the coast was clear before appointing Mr Burke to the cabinet.
But then Mr Ahern, whose version of ministerial meetings was contradicted once more by Mr Gilmartin on RTE television's Prime Time on Thursday night, chooses to see no evil when it suits him.
Others don't have the luxury of the blind eye. One of Kenny's conclusions was that the demand for housing would grow, and it did.
And if nothing was done about it, prices would rise "at an even more rapid rate than previously". They did. And, as one administration after another failed to meet the challenges of profiteering and corruption, we live with the consequences.
Many of those who became the excuse for calling the 1989 general election didn't live long enough to realise the consequences. These were haemophiliacs with HIV on whose behalf opposition parties and independents defeated a minority Fianna Fail government on a private member's motion.
They needed £400,000 a year; the government offered £250,000. The difference, we now know, was less than half the amount casually thrown to Mr Haughey by Ben Dunne and quickly forgotten.
Mr Haughey hasn't gone away, simply retired to Kinsealy where - among other memorabilia of a shameful political career - he apparently keeps his diary records from the Department of the Taoiseach.
This, as Stephen Collins wrote in the Sunday Tribune last week, was the source of Mr Ahern's Dail denial of Mr Gilmartin's version of his meeting with ministers in Leinster House.
The diary wasn't seen by Mr Ahern, however, or by anyone working for him. Stephen Collins quoted a government spokesman: "A person who used to work for Haughey rang him and asked him to go through his records and he did."
Remember Mr Haughey's response when, after half-a-dozen denials, he was eventually cornered by Dick Spring: "Oh, that meeting."
Mr Ahern knows Mr Haughey's style better than most. And Mr Ahern, in spite of all he knows, his claims to have renounced the past and all he has heard from Dublin Castle, trusts Mr Haughey, not face-to-face but at third-hand?
What, then, are we to make of Mr Ahern's assurances on other issues and especially on the dangerously shifting ground of Northern policy?
How the prosecution arrived at its decision to accept a plea of manslaughter in the case of Det Garda Jerry McCabe has yet to be explained. It's hard to disagree with Des O'Malley and Michael Noonan, who find it inexplicable.
But the political ramifications of what has happened may be more disturbing - as Martin McGuinness's supercilious attitude on RTE radio's Morning Ireland yesterday made clear.
What we've had here is murder, lies and intimidation, perhaps not on the scale suffered by communities on either side in Northern Ireland, but enough to illustrate one of the major obstacles to the completion of the Belfast Agreement.
Mr McGuinness insists the murderers of Mr McCabe should benefit from the terms of the agreement. He insists Sinn Fein should participate in the Northern administration.
He does not accept the agreement demands adherence to non-violent pursuit of political objectives.
Mr Ahern considers himself - and is considered by Sinn Fein when it suits them - a leader of the nationalist camp. He has a more serious obligation as a leader of democrats.