Gavan Reilly: McEntee returns to a busy in-tray at Justice Dept

It was uplifting - both as someone who wants political and family life to be more comparable, and as a recent new parent - to see Helen McEntee start her first day back from maternity leave with a video from the kitchen table giving the child his breakfast.

The more that the duelling roles of public rep and parent are shown to be manageable, the less likely it is that others are turned off a life in public service.

There won’t be much time for the returning Minister for Justice to quietly readjust to the pace of the job, though.

I’ve written on these pages before about some of the more ambitious plans McEntee had already outlined in areas like pub licensing reform, trying to finally modernise liquor and nightclub licensing - and the recent controversy over nightclub reopenings only goes to highlight how much that dire area needs real improvement.

The downside of taking maternity leave, when ministers cannot formally absent themselves for six months, is that McEntee’s workload fell to three others who already had jobs of their own.

The flipside of this is that, on return, McEntee has to reinherit the work of three other ministers who - to their own credit - were busy enough in the jobs and didn’t see themselves as merely keeping the seat warm.

Here’s a quick browse of the topics undertaken by the stand-in ministers, as judged by Departmental press releases: licensing for outdoor pub seating areas; gambling regulation, including the prospect of banning all advertising and the use of credit cards to fund betting; judicial planning (as in, the volume of courts and judges needed to administer justice); immigration reform, including the resettlement of asylum seekers from Taliban-run Afghanistan; cybercrime awareness - including the ongoing spate of hoax calls and phishing texts; reforms and reviews of penal policy including imprisonment and remission; overhauling the arcane and unworkable system around public rights of way on privately-owned land; a massive overhaul of the law on conveyancing and property ownership; sexual consent and gender-based violence; ongoing changes to the governance of An Garda Síochána about which Drew Harris is so exercised; a commission of investigation into Waterford abuser Bill Kenneally; and the possibility of supplying gardaí with body cameras.

And that’s without mentioning the source of one of the biggest stories of the last week: the Offences Against the State Act and the operation of the non-jury Special Criminal Court, something many human rights advocates remain deeply suspicious of, but which Sinn Féin now recognises as being necessary in limited circumstances. Paramilitarised dissident republicans might be far less of a threat today than in times past, but the increasing ruthlessness of organised criminal gangs - and the shady dissident circles with which they often overlap - remain a fundamental problem. How can people capable of such depraved violence be expected to undergo jury trials when their networks are so elaborate that any prospective juror may justifiably fear for their own safety? The outcome of the review will be interesting, and the process of enacting any reform long and complex.

Go n-eirí leis an obair, minister - there’ll be plenty of it.