The half-truths uttered by Michael McDowell about his involvement . . . or not . . . in the arrest and detention of journalist Mick McCaffrey over the publication in the Evening Herald of leaked extracts from George Birmingham's inquiry into the Dean Lyons miscarriage of justice are all part of the double standards and obfuscation we have come to know from the minister, whose actions undermine the public persona of straighttalking libertarian he likes to project.

Of the minister's part in this sorry waste of scarce garda resources, more later. It is the perplexing attitude of Sean Aylward . . . the top civil servant in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform . . . towards confidentiality which deserves closer scrutiny.

It was Aylward who, we learned in the Dail from his boss Michael McDowell, made the initial complaint about the McCaffrey story. The civil servant contacted his minister while he was on a family holiday to tell him he was making a formal complaint and that it would be "inappropriate" for the minister to be involved in any way .

In a breathtaking waste of garda resources, that complaint has been pursued for the past seven months by a group of the most senior detectives in the country, and their investigations culminated in last week's arrest.

Sean Aylward, as our story today shows, has a history with confidential information. Within the past two weeks . . . around the same time as the plans to arrest Mick McCaffrey must have been framed . . . the Irish Prisons Service, the adjunct to the Department of Justice set up by McDowell to run our prisons, settled compensation of 40,000 for a prison chaplain who had taken a case to the Employment Appeals Tribunal over the terms of his contract.

The case is a complex one, but the main point is that the compensation paid to chaplain Donall Morris wasn't over breach of contract, it was over breach of confidentiality. Back when the claim was being made, in 2003, the then head of the prison service . . . one Sean Aylward . . . sanctioned the "release" of the fact that chaplain Morris was making a confidential claim. The information was given to Morris's bishop. The bishop then withdrew his nomination of Morris to the chaplaincy and he lost his job.

The tribunal found the "release" of that information led to his victimisation because he was perfectly within his rights to take the claim without his bishop knowing.

It raises a big question for Sean Aylward: why did the secretary general feel no compunction about releasing confidential information about a prison chaplain, yet become seemingly apoplectic that journalist Mick McCaffrey should publish extracts of a completed report which was highly critical of the garda handling of a weak and vulnerable individual?

Michael McDowell has said he stands over all decisions made by his officials but his detailed account of the events leading up to the early publication of the Dean Lyons report are different to those recorded by Mick McCaffrey.

McDowell has said that the Department of Justice press office received a call from a journalist in the Evening Herald on 10 August looking for a comment. On the advice of a "senior official" he was warned of the "possibility" that it was an offence under the Commission of Investigations Act 2004 to publish a draft of the final report.

McCaffrey says he made every effort to contact the Department of Justice, both on the night before publication and well before the paper's deadline on the morning of 10 August.

He was told there would be no comment . . . but after the paper was printed he received a call from the department warning publication was a breach of the legislation and that he could go to jail.

The real principle being undermined by all this is justice. Dean Lyons, who has since died of a drugs overdose, spent nine months in prison awaiting trial for a crime he did not commit, yet although An Garda Siochana subsequently apologised to the Lyons family, no garda has been disciplined. In fact, one of the gardai involved has since been promoted.

There are obvious lessons to be learned from all of this, not least by journalists who are now very well aware of Sections 37 and 50 of the Commission of Investigation Act 2004.

Clearly, witnesses giving evidence to such investigations need to be protected and claims verified before they are published.

But confidence in the openness of the system is not helped by the fact that the minister and senior officials have a very tenuous grip on when it is all right to leak information and when it is not.