A taximen's association, some residents' groups, a children's legal centre and a long list of "ordinary people" are listed at the back of the Crime Forum Report. These were among the 250 people and groups that gave submissions to the Government think-in in Dun Laoghaire earlier this year.
Thirty-three men and women sat around a table and heard submissions from a selection of the 250, and then spent long hours coming up with yesterday's report. It was a "series of reflections", the chairman, Prof Bryan McMahon, said. The forum was not asked to come up with recommendations, so the issues got an airing without the need to come down in favour of any of them.
But the forum pushed as far as it could within its brief. Instead of recommendations, there are "suggestions" and ideas that it "advocates" or "agrees with".
Without the teeth of statutory recommendations, the Government can file the report along with its own 1997 discussion paper Tackling Crime and other analyses of what is wrong with the criminal justice system and how to fix it.
Meanwhile, John O'Donoghue ploughs on. The prison-building programme and the commitment to almost doubling the number of prison cells remain in place. Yet the Crime Forum's strongest statement is that prison does not effectively tackle crime and should be an option of last resort.
Mandatory sentences of 10 years for trafficking drugs worth £10,000 or more will be law by the end of the year, despite reservations that the policy will be ineffective, or even unworkable.
The entire objective of the National Crime Forum has been achieved, Mr O'Donoghue said yesterday. That was "to ascertain what people felt was wrong with the criminal justice system".
Another expert group has already told him that the probation and welfare service is woefully underfunded and the immediate recruitment of 75 new officers at a cost of £2.5 million is necessary. But the Budget and supplementary estimates gave no financial backing to the recommendation of the Minister's own expert group.
Mr O'Donoghue made much of the public input into the forum, but defended the fact that what "the public" has told him is a long way from existing Government policy.
"The whole issue of prison spaces is in fact being implemented. Whilst we always did say there was a need for greater prison spaces, we did not rule out alternative sanctions," he said, when asked about the difference between what the Government was doing and what public opinion expressed by the forum wanted.
He was, he said, awaiting a full report from the expert group on probation and welfare, before implementing any of the first report's recommendations.
The approach of the report was to acknowledge that there was a need for "complex solutions to complex problems", one observer noted. The strongest call was for "a fundamental change of focus to make prison the option of last resort, to be used sparingly and only when all other options have been tried or considered and ruled out for cogent reasons".
Those who are opposed to the Government's crime blueprint, which has involved introducing the toughest anti-drugs laws in Europe and the use of the word "draconian" as a positive description of the post-Omagh laws, will find much to welcome in the report.
"I don't think there are any votes in prison places," one observer said. It will be no surprise to see the report filed with other yellowing publications as a worthy but irrelevant series of ideas. Many of the proposals have been ignored for decades.
The shifting of the criminal system from prison-based sanctions to community sanctions is not new. The Law Reform Commission, the 1985 Whitaker Report and the expert report on the probation and welfare service have each recommended similar measures. The second report into the probation and welfare service by the expert group is due next May and will bring to five the number of Government-appointed bodies that are recommending a radical rethink of crime management. The real value of the exercise - apart from a thought-provoking study of the crime issue that should be available in every public library - will depend on the powers and make-up of the national crime council which will follow.
This next step could lead to a significant change in the way policy is debated and decided. Prof McMahon said he hoped this would provide "a fruitful and rational debate as to how we go forward with these matters."
It remains to be seen.