THE failure to advise Judge Dominic Lynch of his removal from the Special Criminal Court has generated an official report which would unsettle a mandarin's heart.
It was rough and outspoken: charting a paper trail of human error through the labyrinthine ways of the Department of Justice before coming to "unsatisfactory dead-ends at crucial points, with key individuals unable to recollect important details". It went on to suggest mechanisms by which such a fiasco might be avoided in the future. It did not suggest retribution. It was not asked to.
The report extended its blame beyond the present Minister. By quoting a failure of procedures, an inappropriate institutional framework, weak management, staff inexperience and shortcomings personnel policy and practice, it pointed the finger at her predecessor, too. Such decay does not take place in two years. It was very strong meat.
But faced by yet another two-day debate in the Dail on the issue of Department of Justice incompetence, the Government ducked and weaved. It decided last night following a two-hour meeting, to excise the names of the civil servants involved from the report. They are now to be known only as officials `A','B', `C', `D' up to `J'. Shades of 1994.
The terms of the inquiry were laid down by an embattled Minister for Justice on November 8th. Mrs Owen was being challenged to take political responsibility for an administrative debacle which had undermined the Special Criminal Court and which could still lead to the release of 17 high-security prisoners.
On that same day, senior officials at the Department of Justice persuaded the Association of Higher Civil Servants to offer political support to the Minister. She was, an official statement observed, "one of the most able hard-working and personable Ministers we have ever had the privilege to work with". And they welcomed an independent inquiry into the matter.
The immediate emphasis of any inquiry must be to ensure it could not happen again, the statement said. As for responsibility, the officials took the same view as the Minister: accountability, yes, punishment, no.
Fault lay with a shortage of staff and a lack of resources. Senior staff had been working for years under "impossible pressure". There was "constant pressure on a very small number of key officials who are stretched beyond breaking point," the statement said.
Note that phrase: "beyond breaking point". If that was the case, why were such key officials still dealing with "very high profile issues" ? The terms of the Justice-inspired statement were so political they stuck in the craw of other civil servants. Within a week, they were formally disowned bay a new statement.
If the statement angered some civil servants, it enraged Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats. They had the Minister, the Taoiseach and the Attorney General in their sights in the Dail and then this.
The opposition parties will return to the charge today on the strength of this official report. But the Government has been erecting defences. And while Nora Owen will answer formal questions, John Bruton - who has responsibility for Attorney General Dermot Gleeson and his actions - will not. In that regard, however, Fianna Fail will still demand publication of the text of the second letter involving the Attorney General.
As the Cabinet met last evening to discuss its handling of the report and to devise its Dail strategy, Fine Gael opted for a preemptive strike.
The target was Charlie McCreevy, who had claimed under Dail privilege that senior counsel Barry White had made a series of phone calls to the I
it of Justice, the Attorney General's Office and to the Director of Public Prosecutions, alerting them to the Lynch affair.
The Fianna Fail spokesman had refused to retract this untrue statement at the time, Charlie Flanagan said, and he had abused Dail privilege. "I must conclude that the reason no retraction was forthcoming is because Deputy McCreevy knew that such a retraction, combined with the necessary apology for misleading the Dail, would have seriously damaged Fianna Fail during this critical debate."
This was "vintage 1994 Fianna Fail", the Fine Gael TD complained. The party had not changed. Charlie McCreevy knew his statement was untrue and yet he had allowed it to remain on the record of the Dail, he said.
And then the Cabinet decided to release the report, with names expunged. Justification for this course of action was found in a series of precedents, and a Government softly quoted the principle of "natural justice"
The removal of the names is something of a red herring. It distracts attention from the searing indictment of the way the courts section was run within the Department and its failure to co-operate fully with the inquiry. "Work overload" is the only saving circumstance advanced for the catalogue of failures.
It is a defence which has already been rejected in the Dail by Mary Harney. The Progressive Democrats leader insisted there had been a 40 per cent increase in the number of staff and a 32 per cent increase in funding for the courts section since Mrs Owen took office.
Those Fianna Fail TDs who had argued the official investigation was designed to protect the Minister, while scapegoating a few civil servants, only got it half-right. On the basis of this report and the Government's response to it, it will be an entirely bloodless operation.
There will be no "head on a plate"; not that of Nora Owen, nor that of a civil servant. The hard evidence wasn't forthcoming.
The public will have to be satisfied with the promise of more reforms within the Department of Justice. Last week's announcement about the creation of statutory bodies to oversee the courts and to run the prisons were welcomed by the public and reduced political pressure. There will be more of the same this week.
For those who still believed that politicians and civil servants should resign, be sacked, or penalised in some obvious fashion for gross incompetence, some small comfort may be found in the promise to reform the Ministers and Secretaries Act of 1924. The Government has offered new structures under a Public Service Management Bill. It will differentiate between political responsibility and the responsibility for routine administrative decisions. In theory, the buck would stop with those responsible for failures. In theory.