THE Minister for Social Welfare strongly defended Mrs Owen yesterday.
It would be utterly unfair and contrary to natural justice to seek to scapegoat the Minister for Justice for a series of omissions or errors with which she had no involvement, said Mr De Rossa.
Neither did he want to see an official, or officials, of the Department scapegoated. "But we do need to get to the bottom of this saga, to sort out the areas where there were personnel and procedural logjams.
He said Mrs Owen had been an effective and reforming Minister. "On her record to date, she has earned the right to continue filling that post and to continue to tackle and help to resolve the many challenges and problems that the area of justice presents to the Government and the people."
Describing the Opposition's no-confidence motion as "spurious and opportunistic", Mr De Rossa said it sought "to inflate an admittedly serious chain of administrative errors or omissions into an attack on the cohesion of the Government and the three most principled members of the Government.
He wanted to dispose of the "fiction" that the Taoiseach or the Attorney General had any direct role in the implementation of the Government's decision to delist Judge Lynch. "Any member of the Opposition parties who has been in government, any member of those parties who aspires ever to be in government, knows that neither the Taoiseach nor the Attorney General has any functional responsibility in this matter."
It would be ludicrous, said Mr De Rossa, to expect the Taoiseach to supervise personally the implementation of every Government decision. If he tried to do so, it would be an utterly inefficient use of his time.
He asked if the Attorney General was to be "pilloried" for stepping outside his formal responsibilities to exercise his sense of collegiality in seeking to alert a Government colleague to a possible sin of omission by her Department.
"If the Attorney General had taken no initiative in this matter he would, by the topsy turvy logic of the Opposition, be blameless Instead, because he took a proactive approach to resolution of this matter, they deem him to have lost the confidence of the Dail."
Mr De Rossa said he was not seeking to minimise the seriousness of what had, or had not, taken place. The consequences of the inaction on the issue were potentially serious and not entirely certain at this juncture.
It was inexplicable to him why no action - uncomplicated, routine action - was not taken on three occasions. While he did not want to get into the business of attributing blame, he would say, on the basis of information available, that Mrs Owen was entitled to expect a better service from the Department of Justice than appeared to have been accorded to her.