Paul Bradford (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House.

I am pleased to have yet another opportunity to speak on decentralisation, an initiative which I fully support, since I believe it absolutely necessary from a social, economic and infrastructural perspective. However, it has been dreadfully mishandled by the current Administration and Minister. I tell the Minister of State, Deputy Parlon, straight that he and his colleagues have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. When this programme was announced to a hushed Dáil on budget day some years ago, apart from the constituency announcements, there was a hope, expectation and, in some quarters, a belief that it would happen on time. However, no matter what way we twist or turn the figures, progress has been shockingly slow.

On the politics of this question, I listened with interest to Senator Mansergh's contribution. He stated that he expected that decentralisation would become an election issue, something that he seemed to welcome. I join with him in that hope, since based on how the Government delivered on its commitment, the Minister and his colleagues will be judged very harshly. I accept that any Minister, Oireachtas Member or person examining public policy in this country must see the merits of decentralisation. However, the present programme is a litany of disaster and failure.

Senator John Paul Phelan raised an issue in his opening remarks that I have brought up on many occasions, namely, that of Mitchelstown. Some 70 or 80 jobs in Dublin were to be transformed into 200 posts there. That is sadly indicative of the numerous announcements made, which I will not call false but mistaken. Thousands of public servants working in greater Dublin would be extremely interested in moving to more rural or peripheral locations; we must take that as given. However, the way in which the Administration announced the decentralisation programme showed that it was not well thought out. Now the Government is trying to push it through, and we are not meeting with any success.

We must reflect on whence we have come and whither we mean to go. No matter how one considers the figures, the position in March 2006 is that the programme is simply not working. What the Minister of State's colleagues and he set out to do some years ago is simply not happening. If we go through the towns for which decentralisation was proposed, we see that many seem to have fallen from the list. Even in those where progress has apparently been made, which are on a list released some months ago, it has been extremely slow. We must reflect on what sort of decentralisation we practise.

From the outset, many people had genuine concerns about the idea of moving departmental headquarters to the regions, and that issue must be examined. However, the inflexibility of the programme and difficulty in allowing people to transfer from one Department to another are among the big issues. If the Government had announced 20 or 25 towns where decentralisation was to be implemented, where it was interested in establishing agencies, offices of State or Departments, and waited for the response in regard to each, the picture would have been different.

Let us take the example of Fáilte Ireland, part of which was scheduled to come to my local town of Mallow. We are advised that not a single staff member wishes to move there. Undoubtedly, there are hundreds of public servants around the country who would like to move to that region, but the difficulty is that one must marry them with the jobs on offer. We must look at this with much more flexibility.

One way or another, within the next 15 or 16 months we will have a general election. The Minister of State will recall the words of his then senior colleague, former Deputy McCreevy, whom he almost beat to the post in publicising the news of decentralisation. Mr. McCreevy, when Minister, said that if the programme were not fully implemented by election day, it would prove a political failure.

We already know that it will not be implemented in full, but leaving aside the politics, we must reconsider how it was designed to work and the idea of setting in stone what Department, office of State or semi-State board or group should move to a given town. That formula simply has not worked. There may be people working in Bus Éireann who might like to move out of Dublin but who are not interested in moving to Mitchelstown. There are some in Fáilte Ireland who might like to move out of Dublin but who do not wish to move to Mallow. Yet there are hundreds who would like to move to Mallow and hundreds who would like to move to Mitchelstown but who are unable to resolve that dilemma. We must re-examine what offices were planned for which areas and how we might introduce some flexibility to the scheme.

I need hardly repeat that the concept of decentralisation is a very reasonable and worthy one that should be supported because of the many benefits that would flow from it, economically, socially and from an infrastructural perspective. However, when the Minister of State takes leave of his portfolio next May or whenever, virtually no one will have been transferred as a result of this so-called decentralisation bonanza. It certainly will not have worked within the timeframe, and I regret to say that there is no great evidence that it will work at all. Who in his right mind would not want to see civil servants and semi-State personnel adding to such communities as Athy, Ballinasloe, Buncrana, Carrickmacross and Cavan? We would all love that, and we should all aspire to it. However, the system that we have put in place is simply not adding up.

I appeal to the Minister of State and his colleagues to be big and brave enough to say that they will review the type of programme and the mechanism used hitherto. If that does not happen, we will be having bimonthly decentralisation debates in this House from now until election day, saying the same things on all sides without there having been any great progress. It would be disappointing if we did not take advantage of the fact that there are towns crying out for offices to move there and great numbers of public servants in greater Dublin who would be willing to move if we could provide flexibility.

Yesterday we debated the Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Bill 2006. I said that the key word regarding that legislation was "balance". The key word in the decentralisation debate is "flexibility". We do not seem to have the balance right. Prescribing offices for towns before considering the numbers willing to move to each was a grave mistake. How the Minister of State and his colleagues will extract themselves from this mess I am not really sure, but they must attempt to do so for everyone's sake.

We do not want decentralisation to take the place on the political stage which was held by the draining of the Shannon for almost 50 years. We want it to happen and believe it can. However, the manner in which it was thought up, proposed, announced and deemed to happen is questionable. While this experiment has failed, the concept of decentralisation is still as important, valid and credible as ever and may be needed now more than ever. The Minister of State should be big enough and sufficiently politically brave to admit that the process has not worked out exactly as he would have wished, is not going according to plan and must be re-examined in order to get it back on track.

Rural, regional and provincial Ireland needs decentralisation, as does Dublin city and greater Dublin. While a solution can be found, it will require fresh and brave political thinking. I hope that as the Minister of State was first out of the traps with decentralisation announcements some years ago, he will now accept the responsibility of being the first to concede that a new way forward is needed.