Civil service jobs move faces ‘huge problems’

THE chairman of the Government’s decentralisation implementation committee yesterday admitted there were many difficulties to overcome before the plan could succeed.

Addressing the Oireachtas Finance and Public Services Committee yesterday, Phil Flynn said there were huge problems with implementing the plan but insisted it would ultimately work.

“We don’t have answers to some of the questions yet and we don’t even know the extent of the problems, if anything, yet,” he said.

Mr Flynn said a clear picture of the challenges ahead would only become apparent when more than 9,000 applications received on the Government’s Central Applications Facility (CAF) were sorted by civil service grade and rank.

The latest CAF figures, released last month, revealed that just 4,245 of the required 10,300 Dublin-based workers want to move while take-up among State agency workers stood at just 14%. Mr Flynn conceded there was a problem in the State agencies sector.

“I would be the first to accept that the State agencies represent a special problem based on those figures,” he said. However, he said he was not surprised by the lack of interest.

“This shouldn’t come as a surprise. There is an understanding and experience with decentralisation in the civil service. No such tradition exists in the State agencies and there is very little degree of transfers within those agencies,” he said.

Accepting that decentralisation was by any standards a “very, very complex exercise” Mr Flynn said it represented a chance to improve the civil service.

However, he warned that bad planning by departments and agencies to be moved would result in a significantly poorer service to the public and a vital loss of expertise. “We accept that could be the outcome,” he said, adding that many departments had already drawn up plans.

Mr Flynn insisted the programme was voluntary and staff left in Dublin would not suffer. “The personal development needs of those who remain in Dublin are as important as those who are moving,” he said.

Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton said the Government had to rethink some elements of the plan. “The Government needs to step back and decide what elements of this are feasible, what elements are not and make the ones that are feasible work.”