Maurice Hayes (Independent)

I thank Senator Dardis and his colleagues for introducing this important matter for debate. The last time I spoke on this matter, the Minister of State, Deputy Parlon, told me that I had a Dublin mindset, which I thought was teetering on the edge of unparliamentary language although it did not bother me unduly at the time. Dublin is not my constituency; I have no particular axe to grind. I speak on the basis of 50 years of service in the public service. I have enormous regard for the public service in Ireland, both North and South. I have also been interested in planning matters and issues like central place theory.

The overriding priority in planning in this country is to try to move facilities and businesses out of Dublin to provide the space that would give people a decent standard of living there also. We need to demagnetise Dublin and I have reservations about the fact that the national spatial strategy tried to achieve this end by placing too many counter-magnets about the place, rather than three or four large ones. The solution I propose does not exclude the hub and spoke model Senator Finucane spoke of, but I have difficulties with some of Senator O'Meara's arguments, particularly regarding the health service, which should not be decentralised ad infinitum. There is an important consideration of the critical mass at which activity takes place.

I support the movement of public service jobs out of Dublin. The Government, as a major employer, can provide a motor for regional and local development in carefully selected locations. There are different sorts of activities in Departments, however. I ran a Department for several years that had offices in 26 towns across Northern Ireland. Major blocks of work, such as accounting, delivery services, data processing, which can be carried out anywhere. When it comes to a Department's policy-making function, however, over-decentralisation becomes difficult. This is based on the experience of how business is done on that level, which involves interaction between people on the edges of meetings, for example, which cannot be replicated by conference calls, memos or information technology, however good. In Northern Ireland, we had an experience of decentralisation that involved a shift of approximately eight miles in the location of the Department of Education to Bangor. The Department became even more introverted than it had been and it was difficult for other Departments to maintain a dialogue with it. When one consider the principles outlined many years ago in the Devlin report of dividing work into aireachtaí and agencies, there is a lot to be said for decentralising and relocating agencies to the greatest extent possible, while maintaining the overseeing aireachtaí which can be quite small, in as close a continuity as possible. The objective of joined-up Government becomes more difficult when one disperses staff about the place.

In terms of recruitment, one must consider why so many people leave rural areas. It is because they need the anonymity of the city for a particular period of their lives, to facilitate a rite of passage to adulthood. However, this does not have to be provided in Dublin; other urban centres can perform the same function, so long as they possess the critical mass of which I already spoke. Many of these young people will want to return to their local place when they are older and wish to settle down, and that is fine. A potential danger in the decentralisation process is that if recruitment is undertaken at the local level as well, there tends to be a sameness about people, particularly if, as appears likely, the role of the appointment commissioners changes. It is important to develop safeguards for employment patterns. It may be necessary to appoint civil servants who will want to spend all their working lives in a particular urban centre or area as well as others who are prepared to be more mobile. There is always a danger that the public service will lose potentially top-level people because they have become land-locked at some stage in their careers. I strongly support the principle behind the decentralisation programme but I have serious reservations regarding the strength of the spread and, in particular, the diffusion of top-level departmental staff. It is grossly inefficient to have people spending time, for example in cars travelling, trying to hook up with one another over long distances. I hope that will be examined. However, regarding moving jobs out of Dublin, freeing the city and building up strong and progressive poles of growth around the country, I commend the Minister.