The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, has said he would "not dispute" the statement of the former judge Mr Hugh O'Flaherty that his decision to refuse to appear before the Dail committee investigating the Sheedy affair was based on constitutional grounds.
Mr O'Donoghue said any decision to compel Mr O'Flaherty might require a referendum on a change to the Constitution in regard to the separation of the judiciary and legislature.
He was personally not in favour of any "recalibration" of the Constitution in this regard.
In Ennis, Co Clare, where he was addressing the annual conference of the Prison Officers' Association (POA), Mr O'Donoghue said he was not going to dispute Mr O'Flaherty's view that he should not attend the Dail committee.
"It would be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to this. Any change to the Constitution to make a judge available before a Dail committee would mean recalibrating the separation of powers between the judiciary and executive and then we are into heavy territory.
"It could have profound complications and this is a complex area. The checks and balances between the judiciary and legislature have served the Irish people very well."
He added that the response to Mr O'Flaherty was a matter for the Dail committee.
He was not empowered under the Constitution to force people to appear before the committee, he said.
The Government would "welcome clarification of the issues". It would also welcome it if the judges decided themselves to make a public clarification.
Speaking of representations to politicians, he said that if someone was coming up for release the case might be shown to the Minister for Justice, but most representations were dealt with by officials. "No favouritism" was shown to anybody and in the Sheedy case it was shown there was "none shown to him" by his Department.
He said the issue of the Taoiseach's private secretary contacting his private secretary in the Sheedy case was a "side show" and "led down a cul de sac".
The main issue was had there been any political interference, "and the clear answer to that was there hadn't. Everything else was a side show for the promotion of TDs' profiles for the local and European elections and to damage Fianna Fail."
Arthur Quinlan writes: The Fine Gael leader, Mr Bruton, in Limerick last evening blamed Mr O'Donoghue for the difficulties which he said had developed with Mr O'Flaherty.
The Fine Gael leader said it was his view that Mr O'Donoghue "failed miserably in the negotiations that he undertook with the two judges to avoid having to introduce an impeachment motion".
During those negotiations, he said, when he offered a pension to avoid an impeachment, he should have asked for an assurance from the judges that they would do what he was now asking them belatedly to do, to clarify why they took the decision they did.
Mr Bruton was also critical of Mr O'Flaherty's new attitude. He said: "It is not consistent for him to say now that he cannot attend the Dail committee voluntarily. If there were constitutional reasons that were genuine, these reasons would have applied at the time he offered to appear before the committee."