Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Taoiseach said that the OECD was not asked for an opinion on decentralisation, which makes the opinion it did express all the more remarkable. That opinion is pretty categoric. The OECD argued that decentralisation would contribute to fragmentation of the public service. It said it would pose significant challenges to modernisation and the ability to achieve an integrated, cohesive public service. The organisation was quite damning in its criticism of the decentralisation plan.

Is it still the Government's intention to proceed with the plan as announced originally by the former Minister for Finance, Mr. McCreevy, in 2003? The original plan was that 10,000 civil servants would be decentralised to various locations around the country. If it is the Government's intention to proceed with that plan, will the Taoiseach indicate the timescale for it now? When it was announced, Mr. McCreevy said it would be completed by the end of 2006. In fact, he said the Government would not deserve to be re-elected if that deadline was not met. Clearly it has not been met. Of the 10,000 or so civil servants who were to be decentralised, the Taoiseach has confirmed that to date 2,200 have moved, with another 1,200 somewhere in the pipeline. Given what has happened with the plan and that most sensible people looking at it now realise that the original plans as announced by the then Minister, Mr. McCreevy, will not materialise, will he agree it is time to carry out a stocktaking of the decentralisation plan in total, to carry out an audit, to see what is practically possible, to look at problems such as he has described with the State agencies?

It is not just a case of industrial relations problems in the State agencies; the problem in some of the State agencies is that specialist people do not want to move. If the Government wants to effect the decentralisation of some of these agencies, it will be necessary to create a new pool of specialist people in the place where they are to be relocated and then keep the existing specialists wandering around Dublin reading books or reading poetry rather than doing the job they were originally employed to do. Is it not time to take a new look at the decentralisation plan, recast it and come up with something that is realistic rather than keep going on with the fiction that the original McCreevy plan will some day come to fruition?

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