The justice minister has created a brief window of opportunity for anyone who is in possession of an illegal firearm who wishes to dispose of it. Several thousands of illegal guns are in the country at the moment, but these vary widely in type.

The consensus among senior gardai is that illegal high-performance handguns . . .

the ones used most frequently by organised criminals and assassins . . . are brought into the state along with shipments of drugs from Spain and Morroco. There is no proper estimate on how many of these lethal pistols are in criminal hands, but there is clearly no shortage. A young thug who wants to settle a score with an adversary can get a handgun for as little as 200.

There is also a large number of stolen shotguns . . . an estimated 1,300 were stolen in one recent three-year period studied.

Many of these have been adapted as socalled 'sawn-off ' shotguns for criminal use in robberies. Whether many, or indeed any, of these types of guns will be handed over to gardai is in huge doubt, however.

So how new and revolutionary is this approach to tackling serious crime and homicide?

New? Hardly. The justice minister has been talking about a firearms amnesty for some time. Police forces in the US and Britain have staged similar amnesties for several years, with limited success. Then British home secretary, David Blunkett, described a 2003 nationwide gun amnesty there as a "great success", after 20,000 guns were handed over to police. Over 1,400 firearms and over 34,600 rounds of ammunition were surrendered to the London Metropolitan Police alone. But critics noted that the majority of weapons handed in were old, unused or simply used for hunting and few were relinquished in the country's inner cities. The haul did not noticeably reduce gun-related crime.

An earlier amnesty in 1996 saw over 23,000 guns handed in to UK police. Mark Edwards, a community worker in Aston, Birmingham, was among the critics of the amnesty. Many said that it was pointless asking people to deliver illegal guns to police stations, as is being done with the Irish amnesty.

"I told the police . . . the gangsters with the guns don't want to go to the police station and drop off a weapon, " Edwards told the BBC in an assessment of the 2003 UK amnesty.

If there's not much sign that gun amnesties reduce crime to any significant degree, why has Michael McDowell spent so much time speaking about it and more importantly, why is he bothering to launch it now?

Time and time again, McDowell has used the occasion of a tragic gun murder that has gripped the public's attention to reference the proposal . . . particularly when his own abilities as 'justice czar' have been under severe criticism.

He was eager to talk about how an amnesty could prove a partial panacea to gun crime in responce to the outrage following the fatal shooting of young motherof-one Donna Cleary at a Coolock house party in January.

Not surprisingly, some commentators have questioned whether McDowell has repeatedly used the proposed amnesty as a means to fend off criticism of his own department and gardai. Up until this week, the planned amnesty was all bones and no meat, it has been suggested.

And how exactly will the whole process work?

As of last week, members of the public surrendering illegally held guns will escape prosecution for not having licensed the firearm. However, the amnesty does not offer immunity from prosecution for more serious gun crime. McDowell says that any gun-toting felon who wishes to surrender their sidearms may do so at any garda station nationwide. But it's not an anonymous process.

"When they hand in the weapon, they will be simply asked to give their name and address and supply proof of identity. All surrendered weapons will be forensically tested and, where any is found to have been used in a crime, the forensic evidence and the weapon will be admissible in the prosecution of that crime, " McDowell said.

Although the identity of the person handing in an illegal weapon will be stored along with the identity of the weapon, the minister gave his assurance that the individual who handed in the gun "will not be prejudiced by the fact they brought the weapon forward". Unless, of course, they used the gun to commit a crime.

So now that the amnesty is finally up and running, what type of gunman or woman is likely to hand over his or her weapons?

It is highly unlikely that there will be a sudden stampede of trained assassins rushing to hand over their polished Walther PPKs and Glock automatic pistols and accompanying silencers and telescopic sights. It is just as unlikely that the minister's announcement of last week's anmesty will prompt a surge of civic responsibility among the barely literate drug-using youths who comprise the many splintered drugs gangs of Dublin, Limerick and urban wastelands nationwide.

What is more likely is that some elderly bachelor farmer in the back-of-beyond may finally decide to take his greatgrandfather's long-unlicenced old flintlock gun from beneath the floorboards of the doghouse and finally dispose of it into the hands of his friendly local garda sergeant.

Only time will tell if the many sheepworrying foxes shot dead by this shadowy rural figure will finally see justice done. Or the old farmer may just decide to keep his rusty shotgun a little longer, given that Anto from Coolock is keeping his set of Beretta 9mm pistols. In fact, the entire process could backfire on the minister and turn into a farce, of sorts.

Similar gun amnesties across the world have usually resulted in at least one unexpected type of weapon being surrendered to police. In British Columbia in Canada this year, an elderly woman handed in a rocket launcher to stunned Mounties. The anti-aircraft rocket launcher, complete with instructions in French and English, was discovered by the woman and her husband when they were doing renovations to their home in 1973. They were afraid to say anything about it and hid the weapon in their attic. The husband has since died and his widow told police she was relieved to get it out of the house.