The nation is united as one in its joy that a) 10,000 civil servants are to move out of Dublin, and b) are going to do so voluntarily. Kevin Myers is somewhat sceptical.
The Department of This will move to There, but only civil servants of This who want to go There will go There. Those who don't won't, and will instead do what they are probably already doing, which is Godnosewot.
For this is government by two contradictory principles, one by edict, and one by volition; and if you think that rings any bells, well by Jove, it should do. For by that same majestic principle of imperative assent does the Red Cow Roundabout work.
Traffic lights are edicts; roundabouts depend on personal volition. Mix the two, and what have you got? The RCB. Still, it's a fine way to govern, and one which the Government might try to employ on a number of other issues. The first one of course is the Red Cow roundabout itself, which the Minister for Roundabouts might rule that it should voluntarily move to Greenland, where it will become a moose sanctuary, or an iceberg, or maybe even a tree.
Which doesn't, of course, mean that it will go, only that the Minister wants it to go, and to go voluntarily, but without a trace of coercion. So there won't be any Christian Brother-style ear-twisting to get the Red Cow to amble off to Greenland, mooing all the way; no, merely the fact that the government wishes that it will choose to go is sufficient for it to go. Or not, as it chooses - which doesn't take away from the truth that this is now government by fiat, and though the Red Cow Roundabout thinks that's a car, it's not. It's a decree, a diktat, a pronouncement, a ukase, a commandment.
Yet it is also government on the principle of voluntary assent, as we have seen in the sublimely successful move of the Legal Aid Board to Cahirciveen, to which 80 per cent of the Dublin staff declined to go. So those who refused to go were redeployed in the capital, and another 44 civil servants had to be recruited and trained for LAB work in Kerry. The net effect of this was not to decentralise in any meaningful sense, but merely to increase the numbers of employees on the Government payroll for the next forty years or so, before they start claiming index-linked pensions for the rest of their lives. Which is, of course, excellent news.
The seriousness of the Government's proposals to decentralise was revealed by the extraordinarily huge amount of time which went into it planning it: forty eight hours. That's a lot - about forty eight times the amount of time which went into planning the Red Cow Roundabout. In Ireland's answer to Operation Manhattan, a task-force of illegal immigrants from Albania, Nigeria and Romania, all monoglots who spoke obscure dialects from remote regions of their countries, was specially recruited to draw up details of the decentralisation proposal. The civil servant briefing them spoke none of their languages, but fortunately, he had attended some creative dance workshops and communicated his instructions to his new assistants with an especially powerful mazurka, and a quite memorable samba: and his cha cha cha had to be seen to be believed.
However, not everything is going to plan: six out seven assistant secretaries in one single government department are refusing to move out of Dublin - possibly because they know that once they're past the Red Cow Roundabout, they're out of earth orbit and would never get back again. No doubt, had they gone, we might have just picked up their cries for help on short-wave radio bands, crackling with ether and growing fainter and fainter as they headed out into the dark of deep space: Mullingar.
Which means of course, that another six undersecretaries will have to be appointed in those new locations, while the six left behind in Dublin are redeployed. Presumably, the effects of this voluntary-edict principle of government will be replicated through the public and civil service, so that in a few years, we'll have two equally large rival government administrations: a sort of Rome with a multiplicity of little Avignons, with - best of all - twice as many more people on the government payroll, all heading for their index-linked pensions.
But having pioneered this form of government in which merely issuing the edict brings about the desired result, why not make it more general? Why doesn't the Minister for Health simply order the hospital waiting lists to vanish, double the number of nurses at half the cost and issue a diktat prohibiting flu? The Minister for Defence could declare that Army deafness was a thing of the past, and the Air Corps was going to order forty of the EH 101 helicopters.
And the Minister for the first national language could command that henceforth Ireland is to be an Irish-speaking nation: which has pretty much been Government policy all along.
Look, I know I should know which minister has the good fortune to be the minister responsible for CIÉ, but I don't. Sorry: simply forgotten.
I actually issued an edict commanding my brain to remember, but curiously enough, it hasn't taken effect yet; but in the meantime, I suggest to that no doubt splendid person that he or she order a TGV network to be constructed, connecting all the new locations housing government departments - Mullingar, Killarney, Roscrea and so on - with a new Grand Central Station which will of course be situated where the Red Cow Roundabout used to be. And probably still is.