It is impossible at this juncture to say what may be the full ramifications of the debacle surrounding Judge Dominic Lynch's request to stand down from the Special Criminal Court. It is already clear that there has been a most serious failure of public administration, for which the Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, must take full political responsibility.
Already 16 prisoners, some of them charged with the gravest terrorist crimes including alleged offences arising from the murder of Detective Garda Jerry McCabe have been released from custody and re arrested because the Special Criminal Court was not properly constituted. The legality of proceedings governing five more prisoners who appeared before Judge Lynch, after his standing down on August 1st last, is now being examined by the Attorney General.
The facts of the case, as outlined by Mrs Owen yesterday, would be comic were they not so serious. One August 1st last, the Government decided to allow Judge Lynch to retire from the Special Criminal Court and to appoint Judge Kevin Haugh as his replacement. But in a sequence which would do justice to Gilbert and Sullivan, the Government's decision was not conveyed to the judge and he continued to sit in the court. When the Attorney General - only after conversations with another judge - alerted Mrs Owen on October 2nd to the potential problem, his letter was allowed to gather dust in the Courts Division of the Department of Justice. One month later, on November 1st, the Attorney again alerted the Minister but no decisive action was taken until late yesterday. It is not clear if the matter was at any stage discussed between the Minister and the Attorney General. If it was not, that in itself must be considered remarkable.
Mrs Owen, does at beast acknowledge the "great seriousness" of the whole affair but she has been slow - not for the first time in her stewardship of the Department of Justice - to accept personal responsibility for what happens on her watch. The Minister has sought to lay the blame on some form of maladministration and inadequate procedures. She says that she cannot be held accountable for the actions of any one of several hundred senior civil servants and that she cannot be fully au fait with every one of the hundreds of letters sent to her office every week. Shades of another public figure and the case of Father Brendan Smyth here.
No amount of obfuscation can hide the fact that Mrs Owen is responsible for the implementation of Government decisions in her Department. The composition of the Special Criminal Court, which varies from time to time, is a matter for the Government. That is one of the things which makes it "special".
Mrs Owen was party to the original Government decision to replace Judge Lynch. And the Attorney General's concerns about the judge's position were conveyed, not to the Department generally, but to the Minister's own personal office. Judge Lynch was not the incumbent of some obscure district court but a member of the State's key judicial instrument in dealing with serious, subversive crime. Mrs Owen has responsibility for a process which is quintessentially political and not the province of any civil servant. She should have known what was going on under her hand.