SIPTU puts spanner in works of decentralisation plan

THE Government’s decentralisation plan was dealt another blow yesterday when SIPTU officials representing 1,500 state agency workers voted to boycott the transfer scheme.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern moved earlier this week to dampen the pre-election opposition to the plan by giving any civil servant who wants to stay in Dublin to make that case to the Central Application Facility (CAF) to stay.

But SIPTU says that State agency workers are particularly disadvantaged because unlike civil servants they do not have the flexibility to indicate a preference to move from one department to another if relocation does not suit them.