Mary O'Rourke (Fianna Fail)

I will address my remarks through the Acting Chairman.

Thankfully, staff in the Seanad office take very careful record of when they receive an Adjournment issue, when it is stamped and comes back from the Department. That record exists.

Second, the idea that I should seek to upstage the Minister of State shows that he has some opinion of himself. I have every intention of saying that in other fora. He has some opinion of himself to suggest that because he was to visit Athlone I should run to put down an Adjournment matter. Now I have heard it all.

I have asked questions about Athlone, Longford and Mullingar simply because what I would call scare stories are proliferating about whether jobs are coming so that no one is clear who is coming, when, or what it is all about. While there are big signs advertising decentralisation, we lack all sense of direction on the matter.

I wish it to be recorded that we in Athlone secured Athlone as the first town in the country to get decentralisation, in 1977 from the Department of Education. My own brother — God rest him — had initiated it when he was Minister. It did not come through until 1977, in the shape of the examinations branch in Athlone. The idea that we will be overwhelmed by someone running around putting up posters is laughable. We then secured special educational needs when I was Minister for Education in 1991. Currently 330 employees of the Department of Education and Science are working — I hope, happily, but at any rate fruitfully — in decentralised offices in Athlone.

I am very keen to know when the numbers outlined in the Budget Statement will come through. I hope that the matter is entirely voluntary. I expect it to be the case, since the Minister has stressed that throughout. That goes for Longford and Mullingar also. I want to know the status of the proposals, how many jobs will go to each town, the properties to which they are going, the locus of each decentralisation project, and how far advanced are the plans. Each town is very keen to know the proposals, and scare stories have been proliferating that it is not going to happen. I am sure that is not true.

Let me repeat that on Tuesday at 1 p.m. I submitted this matter for the Adjournment. I said that I would not be able to attend on Wednesday but that I could attend on Thursday. It was stamped as having been received in the relevant Department about 20 minutes later. Some six hours later I met the Minister of State in the corridor. Let me say again that the idea that I should exert myself in trying to upstage him is something else.