Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I remind the Taoiseach there are three legs to this particular stool. It is not just a matter of what the Government wants and what the staff want or do not want and the issue being resolved in the traditional IR sense between two parties. The third leg of this stool is the public interest. There is a serious question here, and it is what the OECD referred to, regarding whether the decentralisation plan, as envisaged, is actually good for the service that is being delivered to the public and whether the taxpayer is getting value for money. This issue has to be considered. It is all very well to talk about engagement. That is fine and I do not disagree with that approach, but for engagement to take place, there has to be some clarity about the Government's intentions at this stage.

It is clear that the original McCreevy plan will not happen as it was envisaged. It would be advisable for Government at this stage to relook at the decentralisation plan, recast it in a more realistic way and look at the problems, for example, of specialist agencies or specialist staff who manifestly are not going to move. There is no point in dreaming on that it will happen. It would be much better if a recast, more realistic decentralisation plan was devised and announced by Government rather than the fiction continuing that this will happen at some stage when clearly it will not. In the meantime, staff who should be applying their minds to the job on hand and service to the public are focused on where they will be next year or in five years' time.

Perhaps the Taoiseach would clarify one issue. In the original McCreevy plan the intention was that the headquarters of eight Departments, including the Ministers' offices, were to be located in different places. Is that still the intention? For example, is it still the intention that the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, with which you, a Cheann Comhairle, would have been familiar, is be located in Killarney? It is the intention that the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, Deputy Cullen, will travel from Waterford to Killarney on a Monday morning and back up to Dublin on a Tuesday and continue going around in circles for whatever few months he will be left in that office?

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