A warning that agencies heavily reliant on professional staff should not be decentralised was issued by the Department of Finance just two months before the Government's relocation programme was announced.
The Department also said that access to Dublin and its airport from the selected locations should be "as good as possible". Its views were expressed in submissions to committees of the Oireachtas and the Scottish Parliament.
Contacted about the views last night, the Department was unable to say where they had come from. A spokeswoman said they appeared to be those of "one of the parties consulted during the period before any decision was taken". The Irish Times subsequently established, however, that the concerns expressed were those of the Department itself.
They are outlined in a document prepared by the Department for a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Finance and the Public Service on October 1st last.
It was later published online by the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament, which was conducting an investigation into the Scottish Executive's own relocation programme.
In the document the Department summarises concerns expressed by a number of parties, before outlining its own conclusions. These included the assertion that agencies to be decentralised "should be large and self-contained enough" to avoid disruption of their business and provide staff with appropriate career opportunities.
"In this context, care would have to be taken to avoid decentralising units with considerable numbers of professional staff or staff with scarce skills, for fear such staff would not move and could not be replaced in the new location," the document says.
A number of the organisations subsequently chosen for decentralisation are heavily reliant on professional staff. Only a tiny minority have so far expressed any interest in relocating.
The document also outlined the "necessity for locations to be attractive" to public servants, and the need to have good access to Dublin and its airport, in order "to minimise time spent away from decentralised units".
