Madam, - Michael McDowell asserted recently, "Decentralisation has worked, and will work". As usual with Mr McDowell, there was no attempt to support his claim with mere evidence. He couldn't, of course, because to the best of my knowledge the evidence doesn't exist. No government has risked making a proper study of previous decentralisation schemes to measure if there has been an increase in efficiency as a consequence of locating national institutions in inaccessible locations.
In the absence of real evidence, I can only advance anecdotal evidence to support my contrary view that there is a price to be paid for trying to run major projects from a remote location. Does anyone honestly believe that the remoteness of its Sligo base was not at least partly responsible for the PPARS fiasco? - Yours, etc,
TIM O'HALLORAN, Ferndale Road, Dublin 11.