It is unusual, says Garret FitzGerald, for a government to set about sabotaging one of its own key policies to the detriment of national economic growth. Fianna Fáil must hold the record for doing so not just once but twice.
In the mid-1960s, a Fianna Fáil government, concerned that during the previous 40 years the proportion of the State's population concentrated in Dublin and its three surrounding counties had risen from 23 per cent to 34 per cent, commissioned an expert study on how economic activity might be better spread.
This Buchanan report, published in 1968, recommended sensibly that to bring this about, it would be necessary to concentrate new economic activity initially upon a fairly small number of centres outside the Dublin region, so that each of these would grow to a size that would offer a range of facilities capable of attracting development away from Dublin.
Such an initial concentration of activities and growth of facilities could then generate the kind of hinterland development that had already happened around our two largest cities, where a number of neighbouring towns had developed a dynamic of their own: around Cork, for example, Youghal, Bandon, Mallow, Macroom, Fermoy and Kinsale.
The Fianna Fáil government of the day caved in to local pressures from towns not included in the Buchanan list, thus abandoning for a generation the struggle to halt the growth of Dublin. Two years ago Noel Dempsey, the Minister for the Environment, speaking about his new National Spatial Strategy, described this betrayal in the following terms:
"What happened? Local interests were put first . . . by a range of people - politicians, the local media, the public - with disastrous consequences for the country as a whole and for the west and the midlands in particular. The report was 'shelved' because people were so parochial in their outlook that they couldn't bear what they saw as neighbouring towns benefiting at the expense of their own localities. Buchanan was an opportunity wasted. Thirty years later we have the opportunity to redress the balance. This opportunity is too valuable to pass up."
But now in his own words, the challenge of tackling the dominance of Dublin has been "passed up" for a second time. For transparent political reasons arising from the impending local elections, the Government has decided to locate three-quarters of the Civil Service decentralisation away from the gateways and hubs of Noel Dempsey's National Spatial Strategy.
This is a most flagrant example of the "stroke mentality" which afflicts so much of Irish politics, which has done such damage to our economy and society. The blatant hypocrisy of ministers asserting that this decision has "taken into account" the National Spatial Strategy, or even claiming that it represents the implementation of that strategy, has provided further justification for the cynicism of the electorate about Irish politics.
Following the sabotaging of the Buchanan report a third of a century ago, the Dublin region's share of the State's population has inevitably risen further, to almost 40 per cent. We can now be certain that with this gross failure to concentrate decentralisation upon the National Strategy's chosen centres, Dublin's share of the population will continue to rise towards 45 per cent.
None of this should take away from the fact that there are strong grounds for decentralising as much as possible of our public administration away from Dublin: I stress the word "administration", which is of course quite distinct from policy-making.
Such administrative decentralisation will not pose serious personnel problems, for many of the junior civil servants who at present undertake the bulk of this kind of work in Dublin, under the supervision of a small number of more senior staff, come from outside the capital. Having yet to enter into family commitments or otherwise establish roots in Dublin, many will gladly volunteer to return to places nearer the homes they have come from.
By contrast, policy issues entail constant personal interaction between more senior staff in different Departments from the level of assistant principal upwards, as well as frequent contact between them and people in public and private sector national bodies affected by changes in public policy. The whole purpose of having a capital city is to facilitate such interaction and thus to advance the formulation and execution of national policy.
Wherever they may have come from originally, most of the more senior public servants working on policy issues are now settled in Dublin with their families, often with spouses at work elsewhere in the city and with children in school or university.
Few at that level are likely to be prepared to move elsewhere and if they now choose to remain in Dublin when the policy-making sections of their departments are moved elsewhere, some will leave the public service depriving it of valuable expertise. Many of the remainder who decide to remain will become supernumerary, deprived of the opportunity of useful activity. These will have to be replaced by new and inexperienced staff recruited locally.
Finally, the internal mobility through cross-departmental promotions to assistant secretary posts will be seriously impeded because of the reluctance of senior staff to move between nine different centres and Dublin.
The truth is that transfer of policy-making, involving 3,000 of the 10,300 jobs, is totally counter-productive and will be seriously damaging to the national interest. Only politicians both obsessed with political advantage and lacking in concern for the public good could have dreamt up such a hare-brained process.
The extent to which the location of transferred departments has been determined by the convenience of existing ministers further demonstrates the totally opportunistic character of this political exercise.
Ministers Dermot Ahern, Noel Dempsey, John O'Donoghue, Martin Cullen, Eamon Ó Cuív and Minister of State Tom Parlon have had their departments located in the regions in which they live, while Ministers Joe Walsh, Michael Smith and Mary Coughlan (the latter with a small diversion from Navan to Drogheda), on their routes to and from Dublin.
But what if a future Fianna Fáil, or other, Taoiseach wants to appoint a Donegal TD to Environment, now to be located in Wexford, or a Louth TD to Arts in Killarney, or a Waterford TD to Communications and Marine in Cavan?
Is there to be a further sharp reduction in the already limited time that ministers, tied down in the Dáil in mid-week and anxious to get back for the weekend to defend their seats against aspiring party colleagues, can spare for these now-to-be-dispersed departments?
Or, to avoid this, will future Taoiseachs have to accept a new geographical constraint on what member of the Dáil can be appointed to each of these nine departments?