A reckless decentralisation of the public service risks putting unprecedented pressure on civil servants to favour their department's region in implementing policy, writes Chris Dooley.
If the Government is truly intent on winning back the support and trust of the electorate, it could not make a better start than by dropping its misguided decentralisation programme. The loss of face it would suffer is insignificant compared to the damage it could do by persisting with this ill-conceived, expensive and highly unpopular project.
Decentralisation itself is a good idea, as is widely acknowledged. But the word is a misnomer for the programme which was inflicted on the public without warning or consultation in the December budget. Real decentralisation involves transferring power from the centre to lower levels of government, not simply moving parts of central government around.
The Government's project lacks the benefits of true decentralisation, and has so many downsides it is difficult to know where to begin in pointing them out. This has been tacitly acknowledged by the main promoters of the scheme, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, and the decentralisation implementation group he established, chaired by Mr Phil Flynn.
In a written Dáil reply on June 2nd, Mr McCreevy quoted with approval a sentence from the implementation group's report: "It can be all too easy to list off the potential problems associated with decentralisation". Well, quite. That fact alone should have sounded alarm bells.
The programme, the Government has estimated, will cost €450 million in terms of property acquisitions and building work alone. A small price to pay for improved government, perhaps, but there is no evidence that that is what we will get.
Scattering departments throughout the State will limit the ability of senior civil servants to co-ordinate activities, though it will very likely boost mileage expenses.
It will also place unprecedented pressure on civil servants to favour their department's region in implementing policy, as a writer to the letters page of this newspaper recently pointed out. This is because civil servants based outside the capital will not enjoy the relative anonymity that goes with holding the job in Dublin. Take the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, which is to be relocated to Killarney, Co Kerry. Won't there always be, at least, a suspicion among tourism interests in every other part of the State that Killarney, which promotes itself as "Ireland's premier tourist destination", is permanently placed to get favourable treatment?
The Government's programme makes even less sense when one considers the plethora of State agencies to be moved, many in apparent defiance of logic.The Prison Service, for example, is to be moved to Longford, a location further from all of the prisons it manages except one - Castlerea. The Health and Safety Authority is moving to Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, although much of its legal activity is pursued through the Dublin courts and inspectors are heavily occupied on construction sites in the capital. These are two examples of many cited in a report commissioned by the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants.
Another aspect of the programme is the way in which it will tie the hands of future taoisigh in forming governments. It may be a lucky chance that the majority of the eight departments selected for full decentralisation are to move to locations either in or near the constituencies of the present ministers.
Presumably, however, Mr O'Donoghue will not always be the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism. What if a future taoiseach wanted to appoint a TD from Donegal to this post? Wouldn't they be likely to resist given the distance it would take them from their home constituency?
And what if the taoiseach wants to reorganise departments, as happens routinely after each election? Let's say he or she wished to amalgamate Natural Resources (in Cavan) with Environment (Wexford). The freedom to do this will be restricted, at best.
To raise these issues, of course, is to adopt what Mr McCreevy refers to as a "Dublin mindset". And there is no doubt that the Government's programme will carry benefits for the host locations and in particular their business communities, who will profit from the spending power of the new arrivals.
But for the wider communities, the benefits will be limited. Decentralisation will not bring jobs on any significant scale, unless they are the jobs of thousands of public servants who refuse to move from Dublin. Imagine what that scenario would mean for the public-service pay bill. All of this, of course, is without considering the uncertainty and fear which the programme has engendered in public servants - a large majority of whom, various surveys have established, do not want to move from Dublin.
Bland assurances by ministers about the "voluntary" nature of the programme are cold comfort to people who have been told that their jobs are, literally, going west.
Specialist staff in State agencies have particular concerns because, unlike civil servants, if their jobs are relocated, there may be no suitable work available for them in Dublin. In acting as it has, the Government has blown the goodwill achieved among public servants by its defence of the benchmarking pay awards against attacks from all comers, including Fine Gael.
Through its strong anti-benchmarking stance, Fine Gael in effect told public servants they were over-valued and over-paid. It would surely have paid a price in the recent election had the Government not assumed for itself the role of public servants' enemy number one.
There are other problems with the Government's decentralisation programme, such as the corporate "memory loss" which goes with large-scale changes of personnel in a department or State agency. There is the fact that departments and agencies have been distributed like confetti, with no account taken of the need to develop economic hubs or any regard paid to the National Spatial Strategy, weakened as that was by political considerations.
The problems are, indeed, "all too easy" to list. The project is a disaster waiting to happen and should be scrapped.
Chris Dooley is the Irish Times Industry and Employment Correspondent