The Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has said his proposed measures to deal with the growth in organised and gangland crime were not impulsive.
Earlier, one of the country's leading barristers, Michael O'Higgins, said he was extremely sceptical that any or all of the measures were warranted.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio, Mr O'Higgins said it should not be the case that the criminal justice system should be torn up three months before a General Election without debate or without putting forward information about it.
Mr O'Higgins said the new measures proposed by the minister were not justified by crime statistics.
He said that legislation already existed to detain people for seven days and that, as far as he was aware, it had never been used as it was ineffective.
The barrister said it would do nothing to solve the problem of serious crime.
The removal of the right of silence, Mr O'Higgins said, would extend far beyond gangland crime and would apply to a range of offences.
He added that proposed new bail laws were predicated on the basis of a crime crisis, but that the minister had not produced any data to the public that would justify the changes.
He called on Mr McDowell to put information into the public domain, which would back up his claims of a crisis in the bail laws and with respect to detention legislation.
