Communities to miss out as 40 projects axed

FORTY decentralisation projects are being scrapped under the plan, meaning communities from Arklow to Youghal will miss out.

But Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin has insisted the decentralisation project had been “malign” to begin with, and had impacted negatively on the capacity of Government departments.

Just 32 decentralisation projects have gone or will go ahead, either because the agencies and staff involved have already moved to the new locations, or because permanent accommodation is almost ready.

But 40 projects are being cancelled. In these cases, no staff had yet moved and no accommodation had been finalised. The projects being abandoned include the planned transfer of the Irish Sports Council to Killarney, the Office of Public Works (OPW) to Kanturk, Fáilte Ireland to Mallow and the Valuation Office to Youghal.

Another 22 are being reviewed, including a number where permanent accommodation has been provided but where there are staffing shortfalls.

The ambitious decentralisation plan was first announced by then finance minister Charlie McCreevy in the December 2003 budget and envisaged transferring 10,300 posts from Dublin to 53 different locations. Fianna Fáil later widened the scope of the plan, increasing it to 59 locations and 10,900 transfers.

But while some of the projects went ahead, many were delayed amid financial and planning problems.

In 2008, after the economic crisis struck, the then finance minister Brian Lenihan announced a freeze on further purchases of land and accommodation for the decentralisation programme. The Government put the final nail in the coffin yesterday by scrapping the outstanding projects. “It’s just not going to happen,” Taoiseach Enda Kenny said, adding that the state simply could not afford the projects.

Mr Howlin acknowledged that communities which had been earmarked for projects would be disappointed, but said the motives behind the programme were wrong to begin with.

“Of course people thought that there would be an economic benefit to having an office or a bit of an agency or a part of a department in their home town,” he said.

“But I think the whole approach of the previous government, to see the public service as something to be carved up and diddied out on a geographical basis, there’s something absolutely malign about it in terms of the real purpose of the public service, which is to deliver an effective, efficient, user-friendly service to the citizens of this country.

“I think the most damaging and in real terms costly element of the decentralisation programme was the breaking of the institutional knowledge of departments, where artificially new departments were brought together, with civil servants who weren’t particularly aligned to a department but were aligned to a geographical area.”