THE distinguished lawyer Adrian Hardiman says that we are in Wonderland - with a judge who sits in the Special Criminal Court for three months after he has been relieved of the duty.
What Mr Hardiman does not say is that we have been here before. And, if the Government does not act with more courage than its predecessors, we will be back - probably with more damage to report.
For, to change metaphors, the amazing case of Judge Dominic Lynch is the tip of an iceberg, the rest of which lies hidden behind the forbidding face of the Department of Justice.
And the challenge to reform the system is not just administrative, it's political - confronting a Government which claims to favour the building of a humane, modern society fit for a new Ireland.
Much that is wrong with the way Justice has been administered - from the obsession with secrecy and from the exercise of hidden influence to a pervasive middle-class bias - is synonymous with the bad old ways.
The Department of Justice was, and still is, an assiduously guarded centre of power. Those who presided over it exercised more influence than most politicians or public servants.
Judges, gardai, prison officers, those who wanted fines reduced or licences restored, prisoners and refugees - all looked to the Department for protection, promotion or a vindication of their rights.
Few other areas in the public service touch so many lives at so many different levels of privilege and vulnerability.
And no one who has worked in or around the Department is really surprised that this system should throw up some administrative and political curiosities, not to mention some startling errors.
But not even the most imaginative pessimist in the innermost recesses of the Department could have conjured the series of mishaps which Mrs Owen sketched as she admitted an astonishing error to the Dail.
She called it a matter of great seriousness and, as Dick Spring had already said, an embarrassment to the Government. But it was not in her view or John Bruton's, a resigning matter. And their partners in Lab=our and Democratic Left agreed.
The events which led us to Mr Hardiman's Wonderland began innocently enough with a modest application for a transfer.
On August 1st the Cabinet acceded to Judge Lynch's request to be removed from the Special Criminal Court. The trouble was that by the middle of this week he hadn't been told.
The official gazette, Iris Oifigiuil, carried a notice of the Government's decision, and its appointment of Judge Kevin Haugh in Judge Lynch's place, on August 9th.
More than a month ago, the Attorney General, Dermot Gleeson heard that Judge Lynch was still officiating and wrote to the Minister to let her know.
Officials say that, strictly speaking, it wasn't Mr Gleeson's business: he has no function, they say, in the appointment or transfer of judges. But if he discovers something which he feels a Minister should know, he drops him or her a line. In this case, Mrs Owen wasn't shown the letter.
A week ago Mr Gleeson spotted a reference to Judge Lynch in a newspaper report on Special Criminal Court proceedings and wrote again to Mrs Owen.
Both the Attorney General and the Minister knew there would be legal repercussions if the judge continued to serve when the Cabinet had agreed to remove him.
The most immediate repercussions were dramatic: 16 prisoners who had been before the Special Criminal Court since the beginning of August were released, rearrested and brought before the court again. In the Dail the Opposition called for the Minister's resignation and insisted that the Attorney General was implicated to the point where he, too, should resign or be, dismissed.
The Minister repeated that it was not a resigning matter and, while she could not explain what had happened, an inquiry would begin right away.
The Opposition was not satisfied. As John O'Donoghue of Fianna Fail said, it had to be remembered that the previous administration fell because a civil servant did not bring to the attention of his boss, the then AG, the existence of a file in the attorney's office.
"I am entitled to pose the question now to the Tanaiste: is he going to insist on the same level of accountability, openness and transparency he insisted upon then?" said Mr O'Donoghue.
And Bertie Ahern, who asked how in the name of God and common sense anyone could believe what had happened, said: "This is the land of unbelievable."
Incredible, perhaps, But, as Mr Ahern knows only too well, the title Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented has already been claimed by events in which another attorney general was involved.
Mr O'Donoghue, meanwhile, might consider the irony that his question to Mr Spring coincided so neatly with one of the key speeches in the Albert Reynolds libel case.
This was the attack by Mr Reynolds's counsel on Fergus Finlay, in which to be a creature of Mr Spring was equated with being a snake in the grass.
As anyone with a litter of wit must have realised by now, the FF-Labour administration failed because of an erosion of rust, which began long before the Smyth and Duggan cases were heard of.
If it had not been Smyth and Duggan it would have been something else, seemingly insignificant, almost certainly unforeseen.
This is why those who expect the present Coalition to follow the pattern of its predecessors are whistling in the dark. The FG-Labour-DL administration has its problems, some of them serious, but lack of trust is not one of them.
THE Department of Justice is another matter. As the Association of higher Civil Servants said yesterday: "The officials we represent feel it has got to the point where it is virtually impossible to provide a service that they can stand over to any Minister.
"The Department of Justice deals with some of the most sensitive issues in the public administration. There is constant pressure on a very small number of key officials who are stretched beyond breaking point in coping with very high-profile issues."
With refreshing vigour and directness, the association commended Mrs Owen as able, hard-working and personable and welcomed "any independent inquiry".
It was "gravely concerned" that the Minister should be "publicly scapegoated over an administrative error - with admittedly grave consequences - which was not of her personal making."
It suggested the immediate object of an inquiry should be to ensure that there would be no recurrence. And it promised full co-operation while insisting that senior staff had been working for years "under impossible pressures because of a workload that has grown out of all proportion to the resources made available to cope with it".
That's a brave challenge to a Government which claims to be serious about reform. A challenge to be taken up as soon as it wakes from the nightmare which began with Judge Lynch's innocent transfer.