On Saturday 23 October, at 4.28pm, John Gormley issued a statement about a criminal case currently before the courts. It was as potentially prejudicial to a defendant as any comment made by a government minister since Mary Harney announced 10 years ago that Charles Haughey should be convicted of obstructing the McCracken tribunal. It raises questions about Gormley's character and his suitability to hold a job in government.

For legal reasons, I can't go into the specifics of the environment minister's statement, which was ignored – for those same legal reasons – by nearly all national media outlets, although one leading website carried the story. Once somebody has been charged in this country, all prejudicial comment about his case or her case must cease. Any statement which might influence a jury is regarded as contempt of court by the justice system, where a key principle is that a person is to be regarded as innocent until they are proven guilty. A fair trial is another important principle. Any newspaper which endangers either outcome can be fined. Its editor can be jailed for contempt of court, and the case can collapse, or be delayed indefinitely if the judge feels that the comments made mean that the accused might not get a fair trial. Indeed, this is what happened after Harney announced that Haughey, already charged with obstructing McCracken, should be convicted. In June 2000, Judge Kevin Haugh, citing Harney's comments, delayed the Haughey trial. Her intervention, he said, was liable to influence potential jury members in a way that would dilute or diminish the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, Haugh suggested, Harney's high standing and reputation for integrity increased the risk of a jury member being influenced.

John Gormley clearly regards himself as above all this high-falutin' legal nonsense. In his statement, the environment minister refers to a particular case which has been before the Irish courts. He clearly approves of the fact that charges have been brought. He refers to a defendant and recalls how that person once acted in a violent manner when confronted with allegations similar to the ones which have landed him in court. He goes on to make other prejudicial comments and to use highly emotive words, one of which was used in the actual charge brought against the defendant. The implication is clear: this man is guilty. I always knew it.

Because the statement was mostly ignored by the media, the minister will probably not face any consequences for his recklessness, although as his words sat proudly on the Green Party website last night, he is clearly happy with his intervention. In any event, there won't be much appetite for holding him accountable for shooting his mouth off in such a prejudicial manner. We live in frightening times; a government minister seeking to influence criminal cases before the courts is the least of our worries.

And yet… Did John Gormley not come to power foaming at the mouth about the need for high standards in politics? Was it not he who made a speech about the routine skulduggery of Planet Bertie? Has sanctimonious, holier-than-thou platitude not been the Green raison d'etre for a few decades, at least?

And, now that I think of it, did Trevor Sargent not resign as a junior minister in February because of his clumsy intervention in the criminal justice system? On that occasion, you'll recall, Sargent wrote to a local garda seeking to have the prosecution of one of his constituents dropped. When the letter was revealed, Sargent resigned as minister, apologised and admitted an error of judgement.

The details are different, but the principle is very much the same. Two Green ministers impatient with the way the criminal justice system was working decided that their voices needed to be heard, Sargent's to aid a constituent, Gormley to make some cheap political point. In Sargent's case, a summons had been issued against the constituent, but garda inquiries were continuing. In Gormley's case, the garda investigation is over and a man has been charged. As Dermot Ahern pointed out on Friday, politicians need to be careful what they say as prosecutions have been damaged by loose lips in the past.

Gormley's intervention raises the possibility that the person he mentioned in his statement last Saturday could seek to have his prosecution put off, using the Harney/Haughey case as a precedent. Because the media generally avoided the minister's rant, this probably won't happen, but the fact that Gormley even allowed the possibility to exist shows him up to be somebody of poor judgement, who shouldn't be in such a position of power and influence.

After Sargent resigned in February, Gormley issued another statement, in which not a word of regret was expressed for what his colleague had done. Instead, he praised Sargent for resigning "promptly and without any self-interest". I don't expect that the Green Party leader will resign in the wake of his own interference in the criminal justice system, but he really shouldn't have to. Any Taoiseach who cared about the rule of law and our most cherished legal principles would have fired Gormley last Saturday night.

Yes, he still can: ignore the doom about Obama

By the time you wake up on Wednesday morning, news programmes will be full of doom and gloom about the Obama presidency following the Republican Party's success in the mid-term elections. While maintaining Democrat majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives would be the preferable outcome for Obama, the expected result still presents him with opportunities to increase his popularity by the time of the next election for the White House in two years' time. When Bill Clinton was faced with a hostile Congress back in the mid-1990s he spent the next two years successfully presenting Republicans as a destructive force in US politics and ran away with the 1996 presidential election. As Republicans are even more extreme today than they were back then (expect calls for Obama's impeachment to begin by the start of next year) the president should have no difficulty in presenting them as the drooling band of nutjobs so many of them are. On the list of his possible opponents for 2012, none is setting the US alight. Sarah Palin, who appeals to the Republicans' lunatic fringe, has little appeal, currently being less popular with the American people than OJ Simpson at the height of his murder trial. All is far from lost, whatever you might hear this week. Yes, he still can.

ddoyle@tribune.ie