Derek McDowell (Labour)

I see the Minister of State is disappointed I was not here earlier. I do not want to let him leave without a few statements he can later quote. I will start where Senator Kitt concluded because that is probably the best example of the difficulties arising with regard to decentralisation, namely the decentralisation of Ireland Aid to Limerick. The Minister of State did not address this directly in his comments, although he did hint at it towards the end. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Dermot Ahern, did refer to it in January. Essentially, he said that experts who provide expert advice, sometimes on a consultancy basis, to the Department should not think they are indispensable and that if they are not willing to go to Limerick they can be replaced by others who will.

That was an unfortunate intervention on the part of the Minister. However, I suspect it is also indicative of a certain desperation that has arisen in dealing with some specialised areas of the Civil Service. These people are particularly vulnerable because many of them are on consultancy contracts. Therefore, they can be easily bullied if that is what the Minister or any of his colleagues want to do. In the case of Ireland Aid, there was a report a number of years ago which examined its efficiency and concluded the section should be integrated within the Department of Foreign Affairs. Now, just a few years later, it is being split away from the Department, not just geographically but in every other way, and when people return from the depths of Africa or Asia, we will ask them to got to Limerick where they will not have the benefit of daily interaction with colleagues within the Department. There is a genuine problem in this regard and it is something the Minister of State should address.

This problem is indicative of a greater problem that needs to be addressed. I appreciate there must be a certain amount of bluff and counter bluff in the way the issue is dealt with. I appreciate the Minister of State cannot say that if 20% of people is the maximum number of people he can get to move, he will not proceed. It is difficult for him to say that. To be objective, there is a point at which it is not worth doing and at which he must say, in particular with regard to specialised agencies of which there are relatively few proposed for a move in the first stage of implementation, that the workforce, or a significant percentage of it, has a veto.

I am afraid that the Minister of State will continue to issue statements, as he does when he answers parliamentary questions on the issue, saying that there is great interest, many people want to relocate down the country and that people in Dublin who may not want to move with their current jobs want to move into jobs which will allow them to relocate. Furthermore, promotion and job allocation is being carried out on the basis that people are willing to move down the country and he does not contemplate doing anything other than moving ahead with the implementation phase as quickly as possible. Of course, such statements are not true because there has to be a point at which he will say "we cannot actually do this" because there is a significant percentage, a majority in some cases, of specialised staff who do not want to move. If the Minister of State is serious about the voluntary principle behind the move, he must say that the move will not happen.

I am afraid that the Minister of State will tell people from the Office of Public Works to go as far down the road as they can, perhaps further than is wise, in acquiring property only to find that the move will not happen. Some progress has been made in acquiring property in Limerick, where Ireland Aid will be located if it moves out of Dublin. In a worst-case scenario, we could end up in a situation where the Dublin office is disposed of, money and effort is spent on acquiring property in Limerick but, having incurred costs and made recruitment and promotion difficult for a period of three to five years, the move does not go ahead.

It would be in everybody's interest if the Minister of State said now that with regard to the specialised agencies, where we must retain the people and their posts, that we can only go ahead in certain circumstances, the move should be genuinely voluntary and we must establish a point where a clear decision is made as to whether a relocation will occur.

In his final comments, the Minister of State alluded to some of the human resources issues that arise. I do not want to go into them in detail but some are extremely important. He has been telling us for some months now that recruitment at senior grades, that is, assistant secretary and higher, is now being done on the basis that the people being recruited are willing to relocate. For the first time, we are recruiting senior people within the Civil Service not on the basis of their ability but their geographical flexibility, which, in many cases, will depend on their family circumstances. There are plenty of people who would be quite happy to move to locations outside of Dublin but whose family circumstances mean it is impossible for them to do so. It is likely that those who are in a position to seek promotion to the senior levels of the Civil Service will not be 21 year olds who have just left college, but people who have put down roots in Dublin, want to stay here and whose family circumstances dictate that they should. This is the wrong approach and I urge the Minister of State to examine this issue closely.

We know of the particular difficulties with FÁS and I appreciate that a decision was reached on the basis of the fact that there was insufficient consultation in that case. However, it represents a worrying trait because the Minister of State feels obliged to say that everything is plain sailing and the destination is in sight, which makes it hard for him to acknowledge the real difficulties that arise along the way. I wish it were otherwise.

I got into trouble when I last spoke on this issue for my use of colourful phrases. I will not repeat those particular phrases but I do not resile from the sentiment I expressed then. It is apparently fine for people who represent rural constituencies to have a go, so to speak, at Dublin and Dubliners. Nobody bats an eyelid or thinks it off-side to do so. However, when we Dubliners defend the location of jobs in Dublin or seek to attract more jobs into the county, or dare to suggest that would be a good move, we are regarded as being unsound, at best. In fact, much more colourful phrases have been used and this is not reasonable. There are many thousands of civil servants, from Dublin and elsewhere, who simply want to stay here. If the Minister insists that decentralisation is a voluntary scheme, he must take that basic fact into consideration.

There are a number of well-worn arguments against the decentralisation programme relating to the difficulty that exists with interdiscipline or interdepartmental co-operation and the efficiency of the Civil Service. I will not go into them again because we have beaten the arguments to death at this stage. However, they have not gone away. While I appreciate that the Minister of State will find it difficult to acknowledge this publicly, not least because there is a general election around the corner, such arguments must be dealt with in a serious way in the near future.