Far from shifting the blame for the Special Criminal Courts debacle from the political authority at the Department of Justice, the Cromien Molloy report has landed it back squarely on the Minister, Mrs Owen.
The report by Messrs Cromien and Molloy describes an appalling catalogue of mismanagement and incompetence. It describes inter alia weak management processes, shortcomings in personnel policy and practice, work overload and "a failure to adapt to major external forces and trends". In plain English, the place is a managerial shambles.
It is numbing to think that within this shambles resides the State's apparatus of security and legal administration. It embraces not just its own ministerial departments but the Garda, the prisons, the courts and a host of functions from the Special Branch to the immigration department. No rural bacon factory, 30 years ago, would have been run along the lines described by Messrs Cromien and Molloy. And this is what they were able to find after a mere week in the Department.
Mrs Owen has presided over this farraginous chaos for two long years. If she were deaf and blind she could hardly have failed to advert to the conditions so succinctly described. And Heaven knows, it is not as if she had no warnings or intimations over that period. Yet it is clear that she failed to set down effective ground rules, even within her own immediate office, for the processing of priority business.
Every chief executive - for that is what a Minister is - sets out instructions as to what he or she must see personally and what is to be delegated. Some Ministers have a rule that they must see all correspondence from any member of the Oireachtas. Others insist on seeing everything from Ministers. Mrs Owen, it appears, was content to have letters from the Attorney General and judges of the Special Court passing her desk without a glance, thence to vanish into the bureaucratic maw described by Cromien and Molloy.
Mrs Owen may argue that she inherited these glutinous and sclerotic arrangements. That may be true. But the iceberg struck on her watch. And she allowed two long years to elapse without taking any steps to remedy the deep seated problems within her area. At least once in that period, senior civil servants came forward to warn her of impending crisis. More than once in the same period she realised or ought to have realised - that her information and control systems were woefully deficient.
Civil servants, and the departments within which they work, are inherently incapable of self reform. That is the function of the political authority - the Minister or the Government. Messrs Cromien and Molloy, urging that their report should "not be allowed to gather dust", stressed first of all the "crucial" need for a "sustained political will" to give effect to change.
That is where Mrs Owen is responsible and where she has failed to take action. She has worked hard and she has been at the sharp end of a series of crises. But she has not shown herself capable of rising above the immediate and getting to grips with underlying issues. Nor has she succeeded in mobilising her Cabinet colleagues to a recognition that the criminal justice system cannot be run on a fire fighting basis alone. The present real politik means that she will survive in office, for her partners in Government will not allow principle to overcome their instincts for survival. But she has plainly not been on top of things at the Department. She would do better to move out. At very least, Mr Bruton should find her a less hazardous berth.