Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I am aware of that as it is located in my constituency. I know its location and a good number of those who work there are diligent on my behalf at election time. I know all about the CSO.

The movement out of Dublin of parts or the entirety of Government agencies is only one type of decentralisation. The country's greatest public administrative problem is that it is grossly over-centralised in terms of decision-making. An enormous amount of unnecessary work is referred to a central authority as if there was some expertise there superior to that available in a local authority. The famous "I am directed by the Minister" letter from a civil servant to a senior official in a local authority, when that civil servant is probably neither as qualified nor experienced and definitely not as knowledgeable as the official in the local authority, is a classic example of the pretence that centralisation is better. I wish to say before anyone who has done some reading on this contributes that those in the social democratic left throughout Europe were fantastic centralisers and it took them about 30 years to realise that it was not necessarily the best way to manage public services.

The fundamental problem is the lack of thinking about changing the distribution of decision-making, which is additional to moving part of the Department of Social and Family Affairs to Sligo, the Central Statistics Office to Cork, the Legal Aid Board to Caherciveen or whatever. These are arguably good, although I am not sure they serve the purpose in some cases. Real decentralisation will only come about when decision-making is moved out of Dublin to where it needs to take place. The trend in public administration, especially in the context of the proposed abolition of health boards, is to do the opposite. We could end up with the ridiculous scenario where health boards would be abolished, a central management unit established in Dublin to manage their work and a demand to have that unit decentralised to Athlone or somewhere to deal with the Government's plans for decentralisation.