TWO THOUSAND staff in the public service have been decentralised and a further 2,000 "have committed to moving", according to Minister for Finance Brian Cowen.
He insisted that "taking account of both posts moved and assignments, almost 50 per cent of the civil service general service posts have already moved or have staff in place with a commitment to move".
"The comparable figure for the civil service professional and technical staff is 25 per cent, and current indications are that it is in the order of 20 per cent for the State agency sector."
However, Fine Gael TD Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick East), who asked how many employees would move this year, said that "more than 14 months after the deadline the Government set of December 2006, we find that less than 20 per cent of civil servants have been decentralised, and only 50 per cent of them were based in Dublin".
He said there were a further 26 locations to which the Government had yet to decentralise, criticising the project as a "shambles".
He said the Government "is now hiving responsibility over to an unaccountable body, the implementation group".
Mr Cowen rejected Mr O'Donnell's criticism, and said "it is clear that initial ambitions regarding the substantive programme we hope to see in this area have been altered as a result of the decentralisation implementation group's assessments based on working with unions and management".
Stressing that "we are committed to this programme", he said "the rate at which they will move during the course of this year will depend on the progress made in finalising the building programme and so forth".
"Considerable progress has been made, and it is very early in the year to give a definite answer as to where we will end up at the end of the year."
Mr O'Donnell said the decentralisation programme was a "political decision by the government, back in December 2003, when it said it would decentralise 10,300 by the end of 2006". He accused the Government of blaming the implementation body.
Mr Cowen reiterated the Government's commitment, and said Fine Gael postponed a decentralisation programme in the 1980s.
