THERE are two forms of governmental responsibility to the Dail. In addition to the government's collective responsibility there is a minister's individual responsibility.

The type of error which attracts a duty to resign may be of two broad types. The first of these is some personal act of indiscretion or mismanagement.

The other, which apparently arises in regard to the present episode, concerns an error made presumably by a civil servant in the Minister's department.

Plainly, the essential difficulty of the doctrine is whether the minister should be responsible for the acts or omissions of a huge number of civil servants. Is such a doctrine sensible, fair or useful? One response, which Mrs Owen appears to adopt in this is to say she is "accountable"

in that she must relay information and answer questions, but not "culpable" in the sense of being subject to a sanction if things go wrong.

It is worth noting that Sean McEntee drew a similar distinction in 1961 in the context of a scheme under the Mental Treatment Act, for the involuntary detention of mental patients.

This required the permission of the Minister for Health for every six month period of detention. The junior civil servant whose task it was to pass on the applications for detention to the Minister became ill and failed to do his work. The result was that almost 300 patients were falsely imprisoned.

Responding to calls for his resignation, Mr McEntee said: "In these matters there must be some realism. It is all very well to say that constitutional theory requires that the Minister should accept full responsibility for everything the Department does. But is there anything I could possibly have done to ensure that this would not have occurred?"

While there is no reference to individual responsibility in the Constitution, it has been accepted that the rule does exist here: as has been evident over the past few days, politicians certainly speak the language of responsibility.

Yet an obvious difficulty with the enforcement of the rule arises from the fact that there is no non partisan agency which can establish authoritatively that the convention has been broken.

USUALLY, as in the present - case, if the Minister resists calls for resignation, then the Taoiseach declares or implies that he regards the issue as one of confidence in the Government, thereby shifting the matter on to the plain of collective responsibility.

The trouble with the distinction drawn earlier between "accountability" and "culpability" is that it appears to leave no person against whom a sanction, however well merited, can be applied.

The defects of the individual ministerial doctrine, as a way of providing accountability to the Dail and the public and imposing sanctions in the case of a significant mistake, are easy to identify. It is more difficult to devise a practicable alternative.

Two possibilities have taken centre stage recently. The first option is to establish bodies - like the commercial State sponsored companies - which enjoy a semi detached status from Government, Oireachtas and the political system in general.

The two most recent additions to this family - the courts service and the prison board - were unveiled by Government earlier this week. Leaving aside the murky circumstances of their birth, these developments seem very desirable. Concern has been expressed, however, over the statement that the Minister for Justice will retain some vestigial responsibility for these new bodies. But there is no way one can avoid such a situation.

If we really want these bodies to be accountable clearly they must be accountable to some public body. And presumably this means in one way or the other to the Oireachtas.

It is inevitable that a Minister - presumably the Minister for Justice - would have to speak on behalf of the court services in the same way the Taoiseach accounts to the Dail for the office of the Attorney General. Presumably members of the prisons board could be subject to the scrutiny of the Dail committee system. However, since most of the members of the courts service board would be judges, it would be most unlikely they would appear before the committee.

In short, people who want a courts service which is both detached from the burly burly of the political process and also fully "accountable" may be asking for the impossible.

The best compromise may be to appoint trusted people as members of the courts service and then to trust them, accepting whatever form of annual report they publish - without requiring anything further in the way of accountability.

The other way of avoiding the broken backed doctrine of ministerial responsibility is to embrace some of the ideas emerging from the current "strategic management initiative" in the public service.

The central element, whose hour has come at last, involved an amendment to the 1924 Ministers and Secretaries Act in which prescribed tasks would be delegated to semi detached executive units, headed by senior civil servants.

The programme of work would be carefully defined, criteria for success fixed and appropriate personnel provided. Then the executive unit would be expected to get on with it with success rewarded and sanctions available for failure.

IN THE context of the present confusion, it has to be said that the work such an executive unit would do would certainly not include the core functions of Government, such as appointing judges or removing them. Equally, it seems likely that such powers would be the last to be relinquished to the courts service.

Thus neither type of reform would have forestalled the present episode, unless perhaps by reducing the workload in the Department of Justice.

There are two final points. In the first place the great fondness of our law for procedural rectitude obstructed the investigation by the Dail Committee in early 1995 into the fall of the Reynolds Government. One hopes that history will not repeat itself.

Secondly, it is asserted confidently that the courts service will be set up next week on a non statutory basis. This seems very precipitate. It would surely be better to wait until the service can be set up on a statutory basis, lest it take some decision which has been vested legally in the Minister for Justice and cannot be transferred without appropriate legal sanction.

Accidents, after all, can happen. {CORRECTION} 96111300054