GERARD HOGAN is nobody's idea of a fool.

An eminent academic and well-regarded barrister, he has a record of public service and a successful private practice. Nora Owen isn't a fool either. A former minister for justice, she made as fair a fist of the portfolio as any other incumbent in the modern era.

Professor David Gwent Morgan is another eminent legal academic, based in UCC. No fool is he.

Yet these three prominent figures . . . and five others, including senior civil servants and legal professionals . . . appear to have been sent on a fool's errand. They make up the membership of the Criminal Law Review Group, a body set up by Michael McDowell last November under Hogan's chairmanship. Their work is now complete, but the group's brief life is a perfect illustration of how the making of criminal law in this country has been reduced to clever-dick gimmickry, a development that, among other things, is likely to lead to miscarriages of justice in future.

The review group was set up following a speech by McDowell in Limerick on 22 October last. He stated his belief that the law was balanced in favour of defendants in a number of areas. This is a populist notion which makes great headlines but is rarely backed up by hard facts. McDowell claimed to subscribe to the notion, and he was going to do something about it. He was going to get tough.

"The imbalance is likely to favour the criminal rather than the innocent victim all too often, " he said in Limerick. McDowell, a barrister, knows that the victim has no direct role in the criminal justice process, but throwing in a reference to the victim always sounds good.

The mission statement for the review group was loaded, implying that an imbalance actually existed.

There was little evidence of this.

No independent observer, such as a serving or retired judge or legal academic, even stated a belief that an imbalance existed. But the minister was intent on rebalancing the law. He was going to get tough.

The members of the review group were appointed on 2 November.

Their brief included examining areas of criminal law, evidence and procedure, the most eye-catching of which was the right to silence.

The full title of the group was the Balance In Criminal Law Review Group. Ironically, the composition of the group lacked any balance. No senior criminal defence lawyer was included, yet deputy DPP Barry Donoghue was.

None of the members, for instance, had practical experience of what can happen in garda stations in terms of alleged statements, and how tampering with the right to silence can be dangerous.

The group was handed an onerous task. They were to report on the "rebalancing" by 1 March. This gave them four months to come up with a new approach to long-standing principles of law. The Law Reform Commission, a body which professionally recalibrates the law fulltime, might take four years to do a similar task.

Proposing changes to criminal law is a serious business. It can't be rushed, or you run into a cock-up like the recent one overseen by McDowell in relation to statutory rape. So Hogan's group bore a heavy burden at the behest of a minister in a mad rush for a tough solution.

That was bad enough to start out with. By December, McDowell's urgency was even greater. Now he wanted an "interim report" on the right to silence issue. This report was to be delivered to him by 31 January. Recommendations on changes to a law, the thrust of which stood for centuries, were to be arrived at by the newly-assembled group in less than two months. Even the most charitable observer couldn't but conclude that this mad rush had nothing to do with crime, or justice, or victims, and everything to do with politics and perception.

The interim report was delivered to the minister on 5 February. It was published a week later to coincide with a 'get tough' package of measures announced by McDowell, including an erosion of the right to silence. The minister referred to the interim report as ballast for his decision to do away with the right to silence. The connection was weak, but again it sounded good in the media.

The interim report of 53 pages is full of qualifications, caveats and provisions as to whether the right should be eroded, or an inference should be drawn from a suspect's silence. This is entirely understandable from a group instructed to reach conclusions in record time.

After all, they were dealing with a matter heavy with possible ramifications. Unlike a politician whose imperative is to sound tough in time for the next election, these people had to consider the real world, where their decisions might have long-term, possibly dangerous results.

Still, perception, not detail, is what governs crime. McDowell, in tampering with the right to silence, merely had to point to the review group as back-up for his tough measures. And that appears to be the extent of the review group's relevance to legislation. Its establishment gave the minister the opportunity to sound tough, and the interim report provided media cover for him on the right to silence.

The group's work continued until last week when its final report was delivered to the department. A few days before that, McDowell published his latest Criminal Justice Bill. The only element of the group's work included was the eye-catching right to silence. He didn't even wait to receive the group's final report to check whether its conclusions on the rushed interim report were given a stamp of full approval.

On Thursday evening, in keeping with the contempt for democracy he was displaying, the minister was caught on camera doing a crossword while his bill was getting its brief airing.

Last Friday, after pressure from the opposition, McDowell published the report. Now that his hand was forced, he included a few minor recommendations from the report in his bill. For the greater part, though, he appears to have treated the review group merely as a media tool. Maybe they just didn't deliver the teaktough results he expected of them.

Group members contacted by the Sunday Tribune declined to comment on the rushed interim report.

"We were asked to do a task and we did it, " was all one would say.

The whole affair shows McDowell to be a great man for media manipulation, but apart from his facility at clever-dick gimmickry, he is cut from the same cloth as most of his opponents.

The Criminal Justice Bill will do next to nothing to stem gun crime.

None of the main political parties is willing to stand up and decry the passing of stupid or cynical legislation. All of them fear the dreaded scenario that an opponent will point a finger, childlike, and thunder across the floor, "you are soft on crime".

Nobody is really interested in being smart on crime.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a recent report by the head of the garda inspectorate, Kathleen O'Toole, is a far more important document in terms of crime-fighting.

What criminals really fear is detection by the cops. And O'Toole's report certainly implied that the Garda Siochana is under-resourced in dealing with serious crime. Is there any chance that one of our tough guy politicians might do something about that?