Before we go on to address whether there might be any truth in those claims, let us back up about a week, to the release of the latest crime figures by the Central Statistics Office. The figures showed, amongst other things, that drug crime had increased significantly in the third quarter of this year. After they had been released, somebody placed a microphone under Michael McDowell's chin and, like Pavlov's Dog, he salivated on cue. "This underlines the fact that we're dealing with a very serious threat to Irish society, " he said.

"It isn't a matter of individual choice or freedom as to whether you take drugs. Every citizen in Ireland holds a duty of loyalty to the state and that entails upholding the criminal law.

"So if you do a line of cocaine in Foxrock, you are personally responsible for the murder of someone in Clondalkin or Coolock or wherever.

If you take e tabs, you are breaking the law and you are personally responsible in part for the industry that is satisfying your habit. The same applies to cannabis. There is no tolerated level of drug consumption in Ireland.

The law is the law and it applies to everyone."

This is six degrees of separation, Michael McDowell style, the equivalent in Irish politics of the 'butterfly effect', the theory which proposes that merely by flapping its little wings, a butterfly in one part of the world can cause horrendous climatic consequences somewhere else.

McDowell flirted with this idea once before, earlier in the year, but received little reaction to his comments. Last weekend, he hardened up his theory, and made direct and explicit connections between the actions of some of Dublin's middleclass and the predominantly working class communities which have been affected by the gangland killings of recent years.

How Eamon Dunphy, Gavin Lambe Murphy, Olaf Tyaransen, Mark Cagney, Ben Dunne and a host of other cocaine users throughout the years will react to being accused of mass murder by McDowell is not yet recorded, but his notion is an interesting one. So let's run with it awhile.

The minister is talking about personal responsibility, about taking ownership of one's actions and acknowledging that decisions have consequences. If you do A, B happens. If you decide to take a chance on C, don't be surprised by what happens to D. If you neglect to do E, F is in big trouble. A few months back, he made similar comments in relation to personal responsibility on the roads, suggesting that our high death rate in traffic accidents was not the responsibility of the government, but of drivers who were drinking, speeding and putting lives at risk. He is at least being consistent. He wants us to be aware that in all areas of life, what we do, all of us, has consequences for others.

The problem with such McDowellite logic is that it makes a killer out of the Minister for Justice too. If we take him at his word, and apply his reasoning to his own behaviour, particularly since he came into politics, he fares very badly and emerges as somebody whose actions in some areas and lack of action in others has had the profoundest consequences for so many human beings.

He has been, for example, a member of a government which allowed an Irish airport to be used by US soldiers to progress a war which had no United Nations sanction, which has turned out to be a disaster for the invaded country and which has killed somewhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, depending on which estimates you believe. He has been a member of a government which refused all requests to investigate repeated allegations that prisoners were being transported through Shannon to be tortured elsewhere. By McDowellite logic he, and his cabinet colleagues, bear a personal responsibility for the deaths and injuries to all these people.

Not a strong enough connection for you? Try this one. In 1999, when Michael McDowell was Attorney General, a task force recommended that random breath-testing be introduced as a means of dealing with the growing numbers of people being killed on our roads. The government did nothing. When McDowell became minister for justice a few years later, the government still did nothing. They said such tests would be unconstitutional. Last year, it emerged that they weren't unconstitutional at all, something you'd have thought that McDowell, as a leading barrister, might have copped on to a long time ago. Random breath-testing was finally introduced earlier this year.

In the seven years between 1999 and 2006, about 2,800 people were killed on our roads, 40% of whom, according to all the best estimates, died in accidents caused by an excess of alcohol. By McDowellite logic, the minister's actions, or inaction in this case, make him personally responsible for many of those deaths, which would not have occurred had random breath-testing been introduced.

Similarly, in the case of Gary Douch, who was murdered in Mountjoy prison in June, hours after asking for protection. Conditions in Mountjoy have been the subject of widespread criticism for years. A few months before Mr Douch was killed, for example, the Prison Officers Association had warned that conditions at Mountjoy posed a serious health hazard. "Animals would not be held in such conditions", said one memo from the POA. It warned that the ingredients existed for "violent unrest in this prison". Nothing was done, the warnings were ignored, cutbacks continued, and Gary Douch died.

The problem for McDowell in this difficult ideological area is that he can't have it both ways. He can't attribute responsbility for a death in Clondalkin to a cokesnorting jackass in Foxrock while refusing any responsibility for the consequences of his own actions.

He can't ask us to take responsibility for our actions while refusing to accept the same challenge himself. By his own logic, he condemns himself. So be it.