BERTIE Ahern and Mary, Harney wanted the heads of Nora Owen, of Dermot Gleeson and of John Bruton in yesterday's Dail debate of "no confidence" over the debacle involving Judge Dominic Lynch in the Special Criminal Court. Instead, they got a dusty answer and a rash of reforming commitments from John Bruton. The Dail was to remain a blood-free zone.
On the surface, the Government parties were united. But the failure by the Minister for Justice to disclose the existence of a second letter from Judge Lynch had caused serious fracture lines between the parties. And the price of solidarity appeared to be wide-ranging Government reforms, impacting most heavily on the Department of Justice.
Instead of sacking Mrs Owen, yesterday's Cabinet meeting decided to radically reform her Department and reduce her workload. "But if Mrs Owen suffered political amputation in this crisis management operation, the permanent government" within her Department may have lost the war.
The civil servants had lost their grip. There was never a better time for root-and-branch reform. In 20 minutes of Mr Bruton's speech, decades of obstruction and resistance to reform within the most secretive and powerful of Government Departments was swept away.
There were echoes of the controversies which brought down the Fianna Fail/Labour Party Government in 1994 in these extraordinary events. Readers may recall the Courts Bill - part of Labour's price for entering government with Fianna Fail and then forgotten - became Dick Spring's price for Harry Whelehan's appointment to the High Court. It provided for an inquiry into the courts system and the appointment of extra judges.
The incoming Fine Gael/Labour Party/Democratic Left Government appointed the judges and held the inquiry. And, yesterday, Mr Bruton dusted down a six-month old decision in principle on the appointment of a Courts Service and said it would be established "within a week on a non-statutory basis". It would be given full clout "as soon as possible". With those words, one of the three great empires within the Department of Justice bit the dust.
Mr Bruton was in bulldozer-mode. Responsibility for the prison service, he said, "will be transferred from the Department of Justice to an independent, permanent, statutory board." A second Departmental empire fell in ruins. And there might have been faint cheering as the long-neglected Whitaker Report on Prison Reform moved to political centre stage.
In the New Year, the Taoiseach doggedly continued, the Government intended to enact a Public Service Management Bill which would allow responsibilities and accountabilities within the Civil Service to be clearly set out. "The responsibilities and accountabilities of Ministers will be indentified, so also will be the responsibilities and accountability of officials at different levels of administration," Mr Bruton promised.
Mr Bruton undertook to reactivate the Privilege and Compellability of Witnesses Bill, which had become bogged down in committee. Passage of this Bill would allow a Dail Committee of Investigation to be established, as an alternative to a Judicial Inquiry, into matters of serious public concern.
A Freedom of Information Bill would be published soon, Mr Bruton said. And new procedures for the tracking of Ministerial correspondence would be put in place.
BEFORE the Taoiseach turned to taunt Fianna Fail with old failures in Government, he struck a discordant note. He did not know the full facts of the Judge Lynch affair, he said. And then he repeated the assertion. They would have to await the outcome of the official inquiry, he concluded.
On its own, that disclaimer of knowledge might have passed without comment. But Mrs Owen came in to state: "There may well be more information about which I know nothing which will become evident in the course of this Inquiry." And she promised "any such information will be thoroughly investigated by this Inquiry which has already started."
Proinsias De Rossa returned from the High Court to observe: "On the basis of such information as we have to date, Nora Owen was, entitled to expect a better service from the Department of Justice than appears to have been accorded to her."
And from somewhere in North Africa, Dick Spring declined to clarify the Labour Party's position on the controversy, other than to comment the withholding of information from the Dail had not helped matters.
What skeleton remains to fall out of the Department's cupboard? Of what matters, if any, have Ministers "vestigial knowledge"? Will next week and publication of the Inquiry findings bring new revelations? "Even as the parties prepared to draw breath for today's exchanges, there was broad acceptance the Minister had weathered the immediate threat. Unless, as Eric Byrne of Democratic Left said, republican prisoners began to walk free from the courts, she would survive.
There were a few delicious ironies about it all. Bertie Ahern put his thumb on the first of them when he spoke of an extraordinary situation where the Taoiseach was seeking a vote of confidence in a Minister he was simultaneously stripping of responsibilities.
Alan Dukes mentioned the second. He recalled that Fianna Fail had defended Albert Reynolds - and still do - for withholding information about a letter from the Dail, pending clarification on its relevance. That party was now demanding the resignation of Mrs Owen for a similar offence.
Mary Harney quoted both Mr Bruton and Mr Spring on the correct political action required in such circumstances. And found that neither of them lived up to their high aspirations for others.
Meanwhile, it's backs-to-the-wall time within the Department of Justice as investigators with long experience course the corridors. And, in, the Dail, the Minister for Justice is still fighting for her political life.
