Now he's back with more.

This time he has a "package" of measures to tackle gun crime.

Did he forget to include this package in the long and winding criminal justice bill? Or is it an afterthought, prompted by fleeting headlines rather than any coherent strategy to tackle crime?

Take one element of the package, bail. The minister wants to make it more difficult for suspects to get bail. This, he claims, is designed to protect society from suspects likely to commit serious offences while out on bail. Such a provision already exists, but McDowell says it is not working, so he wants to strengthen it.

Some people believe he just wants to make it easier to lock up suspects, full stop.

With heightened fears about crime, this would be a populist move, and one that might harvest votes, albeit at the cost of eroding a basic tenet of liberal democracy, that one is innocent until proven guilty.

What is really interesting is how McDowell happened upon bail as an issue on which to sound tough. Six months ago, there was no problem. Now, there is. How come?

On 12 December last, the criminal Martin Hyland and the innocent young plumber Anthony Campbell were murdered. One of Hyland's gang is suspected of the killings.

Two days later, a headline blazed the news that 23 out of 24 of Hyland's gang facing charges were out on bail. The story and all the accompanying comment implied that this was despite strenuous garda objections. It looked like the courts had completely disregarded the warnings of gardaí that these dangerous criminals would reoffend while back on the streets.

There was outcry in the media and from the public.

The news could only have accentuated the pain of bereavement for the Campbell family. McDowell jumped on the bandwagon.

On 15 December, he hit out at judges' interpretation of the bail laws. "The simple fact is, if 23 out of 24 people are admitted to bail despite garda opposition in very serious cases, something is going wrong." As it turned out, this statement was either wildly inaccurate or deliberately misleading, and designed to deflect attention from his own responsibilities.

On Christmas Eve, it emerged that in at least two of the 24 cases the gardaí had no objection to bail.

Legal sources believe the figure to be much higher, possibly in the majority. (The actual figure is known only to the gardaí, which has leaked selective details to its best buddies in the media. ) A number of the individuals are charged with minor offences, such as breaches of the public order act.

Only some of the 24 are up on serious charges. Only some of them are potentially dangerous. Patently, the gardaí don't believe that a number of those suspects are likely to commit serious crime while on bail.

But the spin was designed to instill fear that criminals were running rings round the courts, and McDowell decided to make the most of that fear.

He declared he would be tough on bail.

Meanwhile, chief justice John Murray was perturbed by the headlines. He requested details of the cases, presumably to determine whether his courts were actually malfunctioning, or whether they were just portrayed as such by those in pursuit of other agendas.

Murray hasn't been given the details. McDowell's department says there are security concerns around that information. The chief justice is regarded as a security risk?

Or would he merely be a risk to the security of McDowell's spin if he were in full possession of the facts?

This is what passes for a coherent approach to policy on crime from the minister.

Follow the headline, and if the headline is bogus, what the hell, it's only crime. Trash the courts, and if the basis for that trashing is bogus, what the hell, separation of powers is only a fundamental safeguard in a democracy. All these things are mere vehicles for a great man en route to fulfilling his destiny.