A senior academic and noted critic of the Government's plan to move 10,300 civil servants out of Dublin has said the proposal "threatens the future well-being" of government and governance in the State and that, as it stands, it should be set aside.
Addressing the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service in Leinster House this morning, Dr Edward Walsh of the University of Limerick said Ireland should look at the experience of other countries before proceeding with such a major upheaval of central government. He welcomed the fact that the Government was placing regional balance in a central position of importance.
He said, however, the proposal to fragment central government into nine components "threatens the future well-being of government in this country".
Dr Walsh said the proposal as it stood was not decentralisation. Decentralisation involved transferring responsibilities of central government to democratically elected governing authorities, he said.
Those public servants concerned with regulatory work need not be in Dublin and should not be in Dublin. But those crucial for the functioning of government needed to be together.
Centralising critical policy making responsibilities was vital for "agile government". "In essence, a good proposal has been launched without a plan."
There was no suggestion it would make Ireland a better place or that it would make government more effective.
Dr Walsh pointed to the Taoiseach's recent success in negotiating a new EU constitution and said it was important that those involved were brought together in the same room.
He said the negotiations and positioning that goes on before formal meetings was often more important than the meeting itself and that technology could not address that issue.
Dr Walsh outlined a 10-point plan, in which he urged that a revised plan be prepared.
He said the current proposal should be held "in abeyance" until this revised plan was prepared.
He urged that the new plan draw on best international practice and that an "international" planning group be appointed with a view to coming up with a strategic plan within six months.
Dr Walsh suggested the experience in Britain and Norway be examined. Ireland's plan should draw on the international experience of how "clustering" of towns could stimulate a "natural counterpoint" to Dublin.
Also addressing the committee, Mr Hendrik van der Kamp, head of the School of Environmental Planning at the Dublin Institute of Technology, said he did not agree with analyses that said the decentralisation plan was "spreading the jam too thinly" and that it was "doomed".
He said the issue of clustering different settlements deserved closer scrutiny and urged the committee to consider the idea that a modern city is effectively a network of smaller towns and cities.
Mr van der Kamp said the reality was that people often work in one town, shop in another and live in a third.
It was clear the Minister for Finance, in the decentralisation plan, had attempted to bring the various government departments and agencies to areas where there were potential synergies.
For example, the Department of the Environment and Local Government was to move to Wexford, where the Environmental Protection Agency is already located. There were strong links between the two bodies, he said.
Mr van der Kamp also noted the Department of Defence's planned move to Newbridge, Co Kildare, close to the Curragh, where the military is based.
The Garda headquarters was to move to Tullamore, Co Offaly, not far from the Garda training centre in Templemore, Co Tipperary.
Another speaker, Prof Michael Bannon, head of environmental planning and policy at UCD, said the relocation of staff should happen after a decision had been made on whether to relocate their work.
"There has been no effort or no discussion to consider the work factor in all of this," he said.
Prof Bannon said no one would suggest that a company such as Intel should be broken up into 20 or 30 different units, because people accepted the importance of integrated manufacturing.
He said the current plan was not decentralisation or devolution and, if anything, would lead to increased centralisation arising from the increased dispersal of public servants.
Prof Bannon said he found it "deeply shocking" that there was no background documentation to explain how the decentralisation plan was arrived at and what its objectives were.
Such a programme should be policy based and research based, he told the committee. The professor said the process should have been transparent and in the public domain from the start and that the way it had been done was "inappropriate".
Prof Bannon said the job functions of around 12.9 per cent or 1,325 of the 10,300 public servants to be relocated were to move to the areas around Galway and Athlone and that 25 per cent were earmarked for areas he said were within the Greater Dublin Area, including Kildare.
"If anyone can convince me that that's consistent with the National Spatial Strategy, I think they deserve the Nobel Prize," he said.