Where are you viewing it after saving it... my guess is that there is code added to make it display this way... What does the code look like on the page? Is this directly from a DataAssist generated page? If so there may be html encoding going on so that it would display properly in the textarea you used to have and that very code is making it not work properly with iRite.
My guess is that iRite is inserting it properly and that the value is specifically encoded where it is displayed so that the html will display. Please post the line of code where iRite is used and I can see if I can spot the fix.