An announcement, within weeks of the general election, that accommodation for an estimated 400 civil servants is to be built in the Kildare constituency of the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, reflects an approach the Progressive Democrats once rejected as "gombeen politics".
Three-and-a-half years have passed since the Minister, with great fanfare, declared his intention to transfer 10,000 public and civil servants out of Dublin in the largest decentralisation programme ever proposed in this State. But this particular decision appears to be the only fruit of that long-standing commitment.
Last Tuesday, Mr McCreevy joined with the Minister of State at the Office of Public Works, Mr Cullen, in signing contracts worth about €200 million for the construction of new offices at Backweston Farm, near Celbridge, Co Kildare. They are to cater for an estimated 300 people from the food safety section of the Department of Agriculture at Kildare Street and Earlsfort Terrace. A further 100 people will move from the State laboratories at Abbotstown.
Late last year, arrangements were made by the Department for the transfer of civil servants dealing with food safety and other issues. From next June, most of them will be accommodated on a temporary basis in offices at a new business park in Maynooth, which is also in Mr McCreevy's constituency.
A suggestion from Government that this exercise is not part of a decentralisation programme and that it became necessary when the Abbotstown laboratories had to be relocated is self-serving. After all, an estimated 300 civil servants are being relocated from central Dublin and the relevant decisions followed Mr McCreevy's original decentralisation announcement.
The Backweston project was first mooted in February 2000, after the Abbotstown laboratory site was identified by the Taoiseach as the location for Campus Stadium Ireland. A consultation process was promised with other Ministers, in the following May, to decide where other relocated civil and public servants would go. But, following objections from the Progressive Democrats over a lack of objective criteria for such decisions and a failure to designate growth centres under the National Development Plan, the exercise was put on hold. The latest announcements represent old-fashioned "stroke" politics.