The Government's decentralisation plan as it stands will do "serious and lasting damage to public service in Ireland" if it is implemented, according to a representative of senior civil servants.
Mr Sean O Riordáin, general secretary of the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants, said today the decentralisation plan was "the most fundamental change in public administration since the foundation of the State".
He told the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service his union had been "shocked and dismayed" at the manner in which the plan was introduced.
Mr O Riordáin said the prospect of replacing between 92.5 per cent and 98 per cent of staff in 70 organisations over a three-year period was "mind-boggling" and, if effected, would do "serious and lasting damage to public service in Ireland".
The real issue was where the public interest lay, Mr O Riordáin added.
He said he had been "attacked" for raising legitimate concerns and that there was a need for an environment where it was legitimate for public servants to raise their concerns, and that they not be made to feel they were intruding into the public domain in doing so.
In its submission to the committee, SIPTU said the Government should abandon proposals for decentralisation of the State agencies and that the current process is "totally unsuitable" to the sector and "lacks any coherence".
Of almost 2,250 jobs to be decentralised in State agencies, just 46 employees from Dublin have opted to "follow their job". Just 53 people from Dublin and elsewhere have expressed an interest to redeploy within their own agency out of the total. As few as 141 in the entire State have expressed an interest to relocate, the committee heard.
SIPTU exclusively represents workers in the State agency sector and some 1,359 of its members are affected by decentralisation.
Ms Patricia King, regional secretary of SIPTU, said that in principle, the union was very much supportive of all balanced, regional development. This proposal had an overriding principle of voluntarism as its key, but it denied voluntary options for members in the State agencies.
Ms King told the committee the union believed the consequences of the programme had not been worked out "in any real way". She said the "corporate memory loss, the skills loss and the brain drain that would occur would totally undermine the specialist nature of these agencies".
SIPTU said it had had four meetings with the Department of Finance with "little serious engagement".
Members of the committee noted that many of the union representatives today emphasised that their concerns were industrial relations driven and that they did not want to be drawn into the political issues.