Charlie McCreevy's December 2003 announcement of a decision to transfer the headquarters of nine Government departments and 34 State agencies from Dublin to 53 towns threatens to seriously damage the efficiency of our public administration, writes Garret Fitzgerald
It will also undermine the Government's own National Spatial Strategy, and inflict grave hardship on many middle-rank and higher-level civil servants.
Moreover, within months of its announcement this ploy had a damaging effect on the political fortunes of Fianna Fáil which it had been designed to boost.
The idea of decentralising administrative functions of the civil service that involve significant numbers of clerical workers under the supervision of a small number of supervisors is an excellent one.
Previous well-judged moves of this kind have reduced population pressure in Dublin.
It has also allowed many young civil servants from other parts of the country a chance to work nearer their homes.
Yet few of Mr McCreevy's proposals involved transferring routine administrative staff from Dublin.
Instead, headquarters staff and the ministerial offices of nine departments are to be moved away from Dublin despite the fact that the prime function of a capital city is to facilitate "joined-up" government.
This involves Ministers and senior civil servants of different departments meeting and working closely together to co-ordinate policy and top-level administration.
Moreover, this proposed decentralisation process involves much more than Civil Service staff.
It also involves moving 34 specialised State agencies, which, like the policy-formulating parts of the Civil Service, also need to be located close together to enable them to work effectively with each other and with the Civil Service.
And while there is considerable inter-changeability among civil servants of junior grades, this is not the case to anything like the same degree with the specialised staff of State agencies.
Staff of those bodies who do not want to move out of Dublin cannot readily be replaced when they are moved elsewhere.
Those outside the government system who have to deal with State agencies will find this geographical dispersal of their offices very inconvenient.
Foreign investors will not appreciate having to go to Birr to talk to Fás, to Shannon to talk to Enterprise Ireland or to Arklow to talk to the National Standards Agency.
People who have an interest in property will not be pleased to have to go to a Valuation Office in Youghal, a Land Registry in Roscommon and an Office of Public Works in Trim.
There will also be a huge waste of time and money as staff from these departments and agencies criss-cross the country to meet to maintain "joined-up" public administration
Decentralisation also ignores the fact that five out of every eight Dublin wives in the 35-54 age bracket nowadays engage in paid work - they would have to give this up if they moved out of the capital.
Few of these public servants will be able or willing to move to new locations where their spouses will not be able to find similar employment.
It required a phenomenal lack of understanding of modern Irish society for a Government to expect more than a small minority of senior policy staff in nine departments and in 34 State agencies to disrupt their family lives by taking their spouses away from their employment.
In many cases this would also involve taking them away from their older children and grandchildren.
It is this almost unbelievable lack of common sense that has left the Government with thousands of experienced senior staff deciding to remain in Dublin, and with having to replace them with inexperienced local staff.
For a generation to come the quality of our public administration is bound to suffer severely from such a stupid decision.
And the cost of this duplication of staff will be huge.
A key feature of this disastrous scheme that is deplorable in both human terms and as a danger to the efficiency of the public service is the threat to withhold promotion from those middle-rank and senior civil servants who are not prepared to disrupt their lives by moving.
For my part, I find that kind of threat absolutely intolerable, and if this is seen as a necessary corollary to the scheme then on that ground alone it should be reconsidered.
It was also significant that the proposed locations for the nine affected Ministers who were in office in 2003 had to be designed to persuade them to accept this scheme.
Therefore, six of these Ministers had their current departments relocated to regions where they live.
The other three had theirs located in towns on or near their routes to and from Leinster House.
Finally, this ill-considered decentralisation also cuts across the Government's own spatial strategy as barely one-fifth of the 10,000 jobs to be transferred are to be located in the towns the Government had listed in that strategy as centres for development.
The remaining four-fifths of the transferred jobs are to be dispersed elsewhere, thus seriously weakening the impact of a spatial strategy that already involved too many locations.
Why did Mr McCreevy choose as many as 53 locations for his decentralisation?
I have no doubt that the motivation was electoral. Our commissioner's psephological skills are formidable: I know because after the 1997 election I shared a TV commentary on the results with him. He knew every detail of every constituency: I couldn't compete with him!
Unhappily, this expertise deluded him into an extraordinarily naive belief that by announcing the transfer of public service jobs to over 50 towns he could protect his party's seats in those constituencies in the then-impending local elections.
He completely failed to realise that not alone was this a futile "stroke", but that the threat of transferring public servants from Dublin against their will was bound to hit Fianna Fáil's vote in Dublin.
Because of that, among other reasons, his party's share of the vote in Dublin in 2004 dropped by one-quarter, and the party lost one-third of its council seats.
And in the 39 of his 53 chosen towns that have their own local administrations both his party's share of the vote and the number of seats it secured in the 2004 local elections dropped by almost one-quarter.
PS: Has anyone told the Government that for several years the CSO has been reporting that the population of Dublin has started to grow more slowly than in the rest of the State?