Brendan Kenneally (Fianna Fail)

We went around in circles trying to get Telecom Éireann to come to Waterford. In 1992, when I was Minister of State at the Department of Tourism, Transport and Communications, I looked at the file on it and discovered that we would never get Telecom Éireann to decentralise because it did not want to go and, as matters stood, we could not make it do so. We then went after the Land Registry and it is now located in Waterford where a few hundred people are working successfully. There are many people in that office who did not come from Waterford city or county or the south-east but who chose to move to that particular location and are now happy with their lot. That is not only true of Waterford, it is also true of Carlow, Galway, Limerick, Cork or any town or city throughout the country to which people were decentralised in the first tranche out of Dublin. From talking to their friends and colleagues who decentralised, those in Dublin know that these people have a far better quality of life in the places in which they now live.

During the period to which I refer we could not get people to move out of Dublin because they felt they were going into the unknown. Now, however, people are aware of what is available in other locations and it is much easier to encourage them to decentralise. That is why I have no concerns about encouraging 10,000 people to move out of Dublin.