The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, has insisted there is "no question" of reconsidering the scale of the decentralisation programme for civil servants.
He told a press conference at the launch of a report of the Decentralisation Implementation Group that the programme will be "delivered in its entirety" and that there was "nothing very dramatic" about it.
Mr McCreevy announced in his Budget speech last December that he intends to move 10,300 civil servants and their families out of Dublin. The announcement came as a surprise to many civil servants and the move has met with some resistance.
"I want to make it clear that this programme will be delivered in its entirety," Mr McCreevy said. "There is no question of reconsidering the scale of the programme. There is no question of omitting certain elements of the programme either because of the location or numbers involved. The roll-out of the implementation will not discriminate simply because of scale or location."
However, the trade union IMPACT, which over 6,000 professional and technical civil servants, has a motion before its forthcoming annual conference calling for organisations to be removed from the decentralisation programme if relocation is found to be "impractical or disruptive".
The union also welcomed a commitment in the report that staff who opted to remain in Dublin would be dealth with "equitably". But it said the Government has given no indication of how this commitment will be honoured.
The Government has already started the process of looking for suitable accommodation and sites in the towns to which the various departments will move. Today, the implementation body recommended a Public Private Partnership (PPP) approach to finding office space as the most cost effective for decentralisation.
Mr McCreevy indicated today it was possible some civil service departments could be in their new locations by January if the office space was available. The relocation timescale could, however, be as long as 26 to 36 months where a site only is available.
The DIG recommended the establishment of a web-based Central Applications Facility (CAF) to allow public servants to submit applications for decentralisation and to express preferences for different locations.
It is expected that this facility will be available by early May.
Civil servants whose jobs are decentralised but who wish to remain in Dublin will be offered alternative employment in the capital. Those offered jobs in the public service will now be offered them on the basis that they are to be assigned to a particular location within the State.
Decisions have yet to be taken by Government on the locations to which some 835 ICT staff and 500 health workers will move. The implementation body has urged an early decision on these jobs so that they can be included in the online application process. It recommends that the ICT workers be located in three towns, approximately 20-30 miles apart, but a firm decision has yet to be taken on which towns will be involved.
Mr McCreevy said he intended to bring proposals to the Government on these issues "in the very near future".
Mr Phil Flynn, the body's chairman, said the group had faced "a very demanding task".
He said the programme was not just about jobs, but about thousands of public servants, their families, their careers and about the environment and culture in which they work. The report recommends that Government departments and State agencies use decentralisation to "re-engineer" their business and to "embrace different working methods and technologies".