The decentralisation programme is steadily unravelling with the Government now working to minimise the damage from an embarrassing climbdown, writes Mark Brennock, Chief Political Correspondent
The critics who said it would never work were dismissed and sneered at by Government Ministers. But the impossibility of moving many State agencies out of the capital city has become more and more apparent over the past few months.
A few weeks ago the climbdown started. First it emerged that the Government had accepted that the Probation Service would not be moving to Navan after all, for the simple reason that its staff did not want to.
Then two weeks ago came the first sign of an attempt to manage a controlled climbdown with minimum loss of face. In a newspaper interview the Taoiseach finally stated the obvious: that the Government's target of moving 10,000 civil servants out of Dublin by 2007 would not be met.
That deliberate public announcement of the scaling down of the ambition of the decentralisation programme was followed by a private meeting a few days later.
Mr Ahern, Tánaiste Mary Harney and Minister for Finance Brian Cowen met the Minister of State most identified with the controversial plan, Tom Parlon. They discussed the continuing dispute by staff of Fás, who are protesting against the plan.
Some 400 Fás staff were to move to Birr, Co Offaly (in Mr Parlon's constituency) by 2009.
While the Government insists moves out of Dublin are to be voluntary, Fás staff said promotions in the agency had been made conditional on their uprooting themselves and their families and moving to Birr. In protest, staff mounted one-day and half-day strikes and refused to communicate using faxes, e-mails and telephones.
It could not be ascertained precisely what was decided at last week's meeting of the Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Minister for Finance and Mr Parlon. But some sources suggest they recognised that the planned movement of State agencies such as Fás out of Dublin was simply impossible in many - if not all - cases.
Take a random example, the Data Protection Commission. This body is charged with enforcing rules that bodies that hold information about citizens can use it only for specific purposes. So your bank, local authority, or whoever has some of your personal details on file must keep them confidential.
The body has 80 staff, many of them specialists. The number of this body's staff willing to move to their new location in Portlaoise is in single figures. The move is supposed to be voluntary. But unlike civil servants, who can be transferred to other Dublin-based departments, State agency staff have nowhere to go. If the vast majority of the staff of an agency such as the Data Protection Commission want to stay in the capital - as they do - and they can't be fired for taking this option, then the move simply cannot work.
It was the Fás dispute that was of most immediate concern at last week's meeting in Government Buildings. The vast majority of staff, living and settled in Dublin, had said no thanks to the idea of moving to Birr. Sources say that the Taoiseach and the three Ministers recognised the reality of this, and discussed how to get out of the impossible situation.
On Thursday Mary Harney gave a further signal of the coming climbdown. Staff of State agencies faced a "real issue" if they did not want to move. "A little bit of imagination" was required, but she did not elaborate.
Then yesterday, the Labour Relations Commission produced proposals to resolve the Fás issue that seemed acceptable to unions and staff. A Fás spokesman said the proposals were "innovative" but didn't explain. A Siptu spokesman would not go into detail either, but stressed that the proposals made clear that decentralisation would be voluntary. Fás said they would move to Birr on target, Siptu said they couldn't conceive how this could be done.
The Taoiseach's attempt to abandon the deadline, the Tánaiste's recognition of the State agency problem and the apparent Fás settlement all point to one thing: decentralisation will be scaled down, and the bits that do go ahead will take place very slowly and in a piecemeal fashion.
It was always an incoherent-looking scheme. In 2002 the Government announced a "National Spatial Strategy" designed to develop various population centres away from the capital city.
This strategy designated specific towns and cities for this purpose. However, the decentralisation plan announced just over a year later bore no relation to the glossily packaged and grandly announced spatial strategy. Some 10,300 civil and public servants, including whole Government departments and State agencies, were to be scattered around 53 centres in 25 of the 26 counties. While the spatial strategy had identified just 18 "gateways" or "hubs" outside Dublin for development as population centres, the decentralisation programme involved almost three times the number of centres. There were to be clusters of civil servants arriving into almost every constituency in the country.
Mr Parlon added to suspicions that the plan had less to do with efficient public administration than parish pump politics when he allowed his supporters put triumphant billboards around his constituency addressed to reluctant civil and public servants, hailing their delivery to his constituency.
In the State agencies, just 56 people out of 2,500 volunteered to move, according to Siptu. They cannot transfer from agency to agency or into the Civil Service. Nor can the agencies hire new staff - they already have full complements of staff. Fás management insisted Fás would be in Birr by 2009. At time of writing it is not possible to see how this could come about.