Improvements to public services arising from the benchmarking process could be undone by decentralisation, a union leader has claimed.
Mr Peter Nolan, national secretary of IMPACT, also warned the planned decentralisation programme could result in "massive shortfalls" of expertise in the public service.
Government plans to decentralise 10,300 civil and public servants from Dublin within three years were announced in the Budget in December.
Mr Nolan, writing in the February edition of Public Affairs Ireland, said no union had expressed principled opposition to decentralisation, and none was likely to.
It would require inter-Departmental transfers on a massive and potentially disruptive scale, he said. "In a worst case scenario you could envisage almost everyone in the civil service changing jobs to facilitate the Government's plans.
"All this at a time when management and trade unions are, rightly, concentrating most of their efforts on the substantial modernisation and change measures required to improve services to the public under Sustaining Progress."
Public servants were required to sign up to modernisation and change in return for the benchmarking pay increases.
If decentralisation was not handled "carefully and realistically", an unintended side effect could be to divert energy from the modernisation programme and undo the benefits of benchmarking, he said.
Decentralisation could also result in technical and professional staff who did not want to leave Dublin being reassigned to inappropriate jobs, leaving skills shortages in key areas like revenue, agriculture, probation and valuation.
