Shifting civil servants might also change the metropolitan mentality

DECENTRALISATION of the civil service is a good idea.

While there may be some limited short-term pain, ultimately this decision to locate half of our civil service throughout the regions will be seen as a good for our public administration and good for our country’s development.

One of the reasons decentralisation will, in the medium to long term, strengthen our public administration is that it will widen the pool of people from which the civil service will be recruited. Being Dublin-based does not give one a monopoly on public administration skills and abilities. Spreading civil service employment opportunities around the country will introduce greater geographic equality in this country. Those born, reared and educated outside of the capital will no longer have to pay the personal and lifestyle price of moving to Dublin in order to exercise the option of applying for civil service jobs.

The Dublin media and Dublin opinion-formers do not appreciate enough the extent to which many of those who want to work in the civil service do not want to work in Dublin.

Anyone who walks along either of the Liffey’s city centre quays on a Friday evening cannot but help notice the thousands of people (including thousands of civil servants) who throng to get on to buses which bring them out of Dublin for the weekend. They travel long distances to escape the hassles of the capital. Although they work in Dublin, they long for their weekends back home where they have kinships, friendships or GAA commitments which matter to them as much as their civil service jobs.

Any TD or senator for a rural constituency will tell you that he or she gets a large number of representations from the parents or partners of civil servants wondering whether there is any chance that their son, daughter or fiancé might be able to transfer into one of the departments or agencies which already have offices around the country.

Most civil service jobs are based within a square mile of Leinster House in the Dublin 2 postal district. Many civil servants who live in Dublin suburbs must get up as early as 6am in order to be sure they will have navigated the city gridlock in order to be at their desks for a 9am start. They face the same long and frustrating journey home through the evening rush hour.

The decentralisation programme opens the real prospect of a lifestyle change for these country people compelled to work in Dublin. It also opens opportunities for many Dublin people who are seeking a more manageable lifestyle and more affordable housing.

Decentralisation will also, in the longer term, widen the range of perspectives which can shape policy-making in this country.

I have been critical of some of the political handling by Charlie McCreevy of this decentralisation programme but I agree with some of his motives. There is a Dublin mentality which permeates our public administration. The physical locating of some Government departments (including their senior management) in the regions, when taken with the geographic widening of the pool from which civil service employees can then be drawn, will do much to challenge this metropolitan mentality.

Also, I am a bit of a heretic when it comes to things like national spatial strategies.

I don’t believe decentralisation of the civil service should necessarily be shaped by the national spatial strategy. There are about three quarters of a million jobs in the greater Dublin area. Moving 10,000 civil service jobs out of the capital is not going to have much real impact on that strategy. Through infrastructure, investment and other stimuli, the Government may be able to tempt the private sector to divert jobs from the general Dublin area to the regions. However, the relatively tiny number of jobs represented by the current decentralisation programme will not swing the balance one way or the other in the battle against the expansion of Dublin.

I also disagree strongly with some of the recent arguments against the decentralisation programme advanced by the former President of the University of Limerick, Edward Walsh, among others.

Walsh is reported as suggesting that instead of the current proposal to disperse 10,000 civil service jobs across 52 centres, we should instead establish a whole new capital or relocate these 10,000 posts between three or four corridors of development in the midlands and north west.

His new capital idea is fanciful and if we were to disperse 10,000 people only among the three of four development corridors he suggests, the decentralisations would have no significant development impact - each would be a mere drop in an ocean of conurbation.

THE current programme of decentralisation involves the moving of the 10,000 civil service posts to 52 centres in 25 counties. The arrival of these few hundred jobs to each of these provincial centres will have a dramatic effect - they will cause a big splash in a small town pond. The decentralisation could be a stimulus for urban renewal and will also give their host communities an influx of significant and public-spirited leaders.

The growing opposition to the decentralisation proposal among the civil service itself is disturbing in its extent and intensity. The civil service should see decentralisation as an opportunity in which they have a choice to participate. There must inevitably be an element of disruption for one generation of the civil service if we are ever to have decentralisation. It has to be possible some day, in some generation, to break the centric hold which Dublin has upon our civil service and on policy-making in this country.

There have been significant failings over the last seven months in explaining and communicating the current decentralisation programme. However, that should not take from the merit of the programme itself.

There are now signs that the Government has got the message that decentralisation must be handled with more political skill and leadership.

It is a welcome development that Charlie McCreevy re-entered the public debate on the issue this week and penned an article on it in one of the national dailies. It is even more welcome that, belatedly, the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and General Affairs is going to spend a day or two holding hearings on the topic.

The endeavour of a Government backbench majority on the committee last month to veto hearings on decentralisation was somewhat ham-fisted.

It arose in part because of the committee’s lengthy agenda exploring the recent scandals in the financial institutions. However, it was also partly due, I suspect, to real or perceived ministerial pressure.

Here’s hoping the Oireachtas committee hearings are an opportunity for a reasoned and informed debate on the decentralisation programme.

Here’s hoping it will alleviate some of the concerns of civil servants and their families. Here’s also hoping that the Minister for Finance himself will avail of the opportunity to put his case for the current decentralisation programme.