The Minister for Justice will bring a memo to Government seeking the incorporation of some recommendations from the Fennelly Report on the Criminal Jurisdiction of the Courts into legislation already being drafted.
Mr McDowell told The Irish Times that he will ask the Government to "add another carriage to the train" of the Courts and Civil Liabilities Bill, currently under preparation.
He was speaking after being formally presented with the report by the chairman of the working group, Mr Justice Fennelly, yesterday.
Introducing the report, Mr Justice Fennelly said that the current system of allocating cases to the Circuit or the Central Criminal Court was both excessively rigid and lacking in basic logic.
At the moment, all such cases must go to the Central Criminal Court, where delays have been running at between 18 months and two years.
Mr Justice Fennelly added that persistent delays in the Central Criminal Court were contrary to the interests of justice and of the victims of crime.
Although the working group considered the option of a National Criminal Court, as promised in the Programme for Government, it concluded that it would not be helpful in this jurisdiction, he said.
Instead, it decided that there should be a common pool of cases, which would then be allocated to the Central or Circuit Criminal court according to certain criteria.
These would include the views of the complainant, which, in murder cases, would mean relatives of the deceased; the need, where relevant, to preserve anonymity; and the need for a speedy trial. The venue of the trial would be decided by the Circuit Court at an early date.
The report also proposes the introduction of pre-trial hearings on a pilot basis, to identify issues that can be dealt with before trial.
"It is my intention to move quickly in relation to the issues raised," Mr McDowell said in welcoming the report.
"The issues are so clearly presented and so strongly argued that the responsibility of Government should be accelerated rather than delayed. If this involves breaking a promise to the electorate to have a National Criminal Court, we will have a huge alibi."
Mr McDowell said there was a "fine balance" between having a National Criminal Court and preserving the existing tiered system, but giving it shared jurisdiction on all offences except treason and certain competition crimes. "The substance is the same in either option. The outcome of legislative change should be to provide for the pooling [of offences] rather their artificial division according to category."
He said that there would be some who would be concerned about rape being tried in the Circuit Court. He asked anyone with such concerns to consider the needs of the complainant not to have undue delay in seeing the trial take place, and "the darkening stain placed on her quality of life in the interim".
The report also called for the restoration to the accused of the right to opt for trial by jury even in minor offences. It stated that there seemed to be no logical reason for some categories of crime to carry the right to a jury trial, while others did not. Agreeing with this observation, Mr McDowell added that the Director of Public Prosecutions had dissented from the majority recommendation on this issue.
While saying he was keeping an open mind, he added: "The value of jury trial must be constantly reaffirmed in this State. We should not regard this as an inconvenience but as one of the exemplars of the genetic character of a common law state. The common law states' great political and civil rights heritage comes from the role of independent judges, with and without juries. The old adage that it is absurd to afford a jury trial for stealing an apple may well be so from the point of view of executive convenience.
"But the consequences of a conviction for theft are such that they could mean that a person so convicted could not be in their job."