Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

I would like to challenge the Minister on the figure of 6,000. The bulk of those were people who were already outside of Dublin who wanted to relocate from one place outside of Dublin to another, for example, someone in Sligo hoping to go to Carrick-on-Shannon to be closer to home. Will the Minister agree that is where the majority of the decentralisation moves occurred?

Has the Minister a figure for the total number of civil servants in outposts, who will not be joined by others for decades? They will rattle around in large Government buildings and offices with only the ghost of Charlie McCreevy to comfort them. What does the Minister expect the six civil servants here or the seven civil servants there to do? They could go mad, left alone in a large building in Carrick-on-Shannon, or someplace like that, with nothing to do.

Will the Minister please apologise to taxpayers for the waste by the Government of at least €30 million of taxpayers' hard-earned money? That money could have been used in those towns for hospitals, teachers and all sorts of facilities. Instead, it has gone to developers and landlords to rent offices that a few ghost figures in the Civil Service can rattle around in. Does the Minister intend to visit those people and comfort them occasionally and let them know they are not forgotten and that although they are on their own, somebody somewhere in the bowels of the Department of Finance knows they are still there? After the war, the Japanese soldiers who wandered in the jungles in Sumatra did not know the war was over. We have poor civil servants rattling around buildings on their own, not knowing that decentralisation is over.

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