It would be comforting to believe that the Government's decision - at this very time - to transfer responsibility for the prisons and the courts from the Department of Justice has been actuated by its commitment to the far-reaching reform of the criminal justice system long advocated by this newspaper.
The motivation is transparently less lofty. A harassed government has re-cycled the proposals of the Denham report on the courts and reached back more than a decade for Dr Ken Whitaker's proposals on the prisons. Can anyone doubt this has been done to shore up the position of embattled Mrs Nora Owen and to divert attention from her plight? It is difficult to envisage a more cynical gesture. Fundamental reforms of the courts and prison services are being introduced not as a considered response to the malaise in the criminal justice system but as part of a fire-brigade response to a political crisis.
For all that, it would be churlish not to welcome. the decision to remove day-to-day control of the prisons and courts service from the Department of Justice. It is now eleven years since the Whitaker report, in recommending the establishment of a prisons board, stated that the "excessive influence" of the Department of Justice had adversely affected the quality of management in the prison service. Successive governments were content to allow the report gather dust on the Department's shelves, as the prison service stumbled from crisis to crisis without any coherent strategy or objectives. An independent prisons board, free to decide long-term policy without reference to the narrow political needs of any individual minister, must represent a better way.
The decision to establish a separate court service was originally made by Cabinet in May but it is only now being implemented. The case for such a body was graphically underlined by two recent reports which were scathing about the crisis-management and the lack of forward planning in the courts service.
What is envisaged is a unified courts system, replacing the current arrangements in which management is shared by a number of disparate agencies (the Department of Justice, the Office of Public Works, county councils, court registrars and the judiciary). It is to be hoped that the new arrangement will bring greater efficiency to an over-burdened system of court administration. Better administration will not necessarily yield a better quality of justice. But it might help to get work done more quickly and to allow those who work in the system and those who pass through it a measure of comfort and dignity which is too often denied them in current conditions.
Mrs Owen, meanwhile, is continuing to tough it out. It may be that her hold on office has become more precarious in the past 24 hours. Support from her coalition partners is still solid but it is no longer unequivocal.
The Minister knows - and Mr Eric Byrne of Democratic Left was not slow to remind her yesterday - that her political fate may now rest on the outcome of the current High Court challenge by some of the alleged offenders released and re-arrested last week. And it seems possible that the inquiry into the Judge Lynch affair will bring further embarrassing revelations.
Mrs Owen is a doughty fighter who needs few lessons on the art of political survival. But there is a strong sense, as the Government faces into today's no confidence vote, that Labour and Democratic Left are more than a little nervous about the immediate future.