Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I cannot understand how the Taoiseach can say this city cannot take the pressure and that we must alleviate it while the Government ignores its own national spatial strategy. The Taoiseach said the task is to take pressure off this city but when one checks the applicants applying for transfers to various Departments, a high percentage of them are civil and public servants living in parts of the country other than Dublin who wish to transfer to other parts of the country. How will such transfers alleviate the pressure in Dublin? What is the point in saying to people that such a transfer is voluntary when they are presented with Hobson's choice to either relocate or not be considered for promotion or to relocate because if they stay here they will have nothing to do? We will end up with a Civil Service similar to the Legal Aid Board, which has two head offices, one in Cahirciveen and one in Mount Street, with all the costs involved in personnel flying by Aer Arann to this city two or three times a week. That is the model we will have throughout the country. We will have a parallel Civil Service.

There is no difficulty about a planned programme of negotiated relocation and the one to which the Taoiseach referred took successive Governments ten years to agree. What is involved here is the enforced compulsory relocation of public and civil servants. That is not acceptable. The Taoiseach knows he has misled——

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