Jack Wall (Kildare South, Labour)
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Question 238: To ask the Minister for Defence the reason he is decentralising the Department of Defence to Newbridge, County Kildare; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [3125/04]

Michael Smith (Tipperary North, Fianna Fail)
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The Government has decided that my Department's Dublin based Civil Service staff and Defence Forces headquarters should be decentralised to Newbridge and the Curragh respectively. A wide range of factors were taken into account and balanced against each other by the Government in selecting Departments and agencies for decentralisation and locations for the new decentralised offices. These factors included: in selecting Departments and agencies for decentralisation, the core business and nature of the relevant Departments-agencies and the location of their customer base; and in selecting locations for decentralised offices, the need to achieve a fit with the national spatial strategy, in terms of the gateways, hubs and their respective catchments, the location of existing decentralised offices, the desirability of clustering a Department's decentralised units within a region, the importance of respecting the scale and character of locations in terms of their capacity to absorb the number of new jobs involved, the existence of good transport links — by road, rail and-or air — and the general infrastructural capacity in the areas selected.