Mr. Martin Bourke:

I think the significant thing about the Departments, particularly the Department of Health, is that they would be considered very much to be policy Departments. As I understand it, there is a Minister and two or three Ministers of State in that Department alone. I know from another life that it handles about 11,000 or 12,000 parliamentary questions a year, which is a phenomenal number. That shows how closely associated it is with the Dáil and the Houses of the Oireachtas. There is, therefore, a choice: do you go farther out of the city and have rafts of officials in taxis and particularly on overtime, constantly coming to and out of the Dáil, or do you take a prudent decision and decide that it is more sensible that they be closer to the Dáil with maybe someone else who is not in the Dáil as often being slightly further out? That is the balance to be struck. For instance, one would not locate a warehouse in the city centre; one would locate it out towards the M50 or farther out in the countryside. It is about the nature of the Department; the Department of Health, although there are others, is particularly policy-driven.