Public and civil service trade unions today told an Oireachtas committee today that the Government must "rethink" its controversial decentralisation plan.
The State's largest public sector union, Impact, told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service that most of its members will not move out Dublin "under any circumstances" despite the Taoiseach's insistence the plan to move many State agencies from Dublin to the regions will go ahead.
The union said the plan was "neither practical or workable" in its present form and that regional labour markets would be unable to fill key vacancies created by specialist workers refusing to move.
The Government has stated that no one will be forced to move under the plan and that they would be accommodated in other areas of the public and civil service in Dublin.
Impact national secretary Mr Peter Nolan said the consequence of specialists remaining in Dublin could cost the taxpayer up to €50 million extra in salaries.
He said the money would be wasted because specialists - such as probation officers, property valuers, architects, marine geologists, accountants, psychologists, and legal experts - are not transferable to other duties.
"All the evidence is that taxpayers will have to stump up more, while specialist services could collapse," Mr Nolan said.
He was speaking on the second day of the committee's examination of the decentralisation plan announced by the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, in his budget speech last December. Mr McCreevy said the programme to relocate 10,300 workers within three years would be self-financing.
But the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have acknowledged the timeframe is not likely to be met.
Yesterday, Dr Edward Walsh of the University of Limerick said the proposal to move entire government departments out of Dublin "threatens the future well-being of government in this country".
Senior civil servants told the committee that significant resources would be needed to ensure a smooth transition and minimise the loss of "corporate memory" from departments.
They also warned of the need to "be realistic" about the length of time it takes to make such major moves and train staff.
The Government plans to locate decentralised workers in 54 separate centres - a move critics say fails to account for the National Spatial Strategy, which urges the development of "critical mass" cities and development hubs.
Mr Hendrik van der Kamp, head of the School of Environmental Planning at the Dublin Institute of Technology, was more positive, saying he did not believe decentralisation was "spreading the jam too thinly".
He told the committee that 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.