It was one of the big plans of Bertie Aherns government: to move 10,300 Dublin-based public servants outside the capital before 2007. Today, with just 3,159 jobs moved, the misguided project lies in ruins. Part one of a three-part series looks at an idea whose time has gone

CHARLIE McCREEVY used to call it the Big D – and the project was so secret that even top civil servants were kept in the dark until the last minute. The staggering scale of this smash-and-grab plot was known to less than a handful of ministers until he finally revealed it in his budget speech as minister for finance on December 4th 2003.

The Big D was McCreevy’s code for decentralisation, the most audacious such plan since the foundation of the State, involving the dispersal of 10,300 public servants based in Dublin to 53 locations in 25 counties (more were added later, bringing the planned totals even higher: 10,922 people to 58 locations). It even included relocating the headquarters of eight government departments in places as far apart as Cavan and Killarney.

Agriculture was going to Portlaoise; Arts, Sport and Tourism to Killarney; Communications, Marine and Natural Resources to Cavan; Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs to Knock Airport; Defence to Newbridge; Education and Science to Mullingar; Environment, Heritage and Local Government to Wexford; and Social and Family Affairs to Drogheda.

Ministers with headquarters outside of Dublin were to be provided with a suite of offices for a small secretariat in the vicinity of Leinster House “so they can conduct business while in Dublin and when the Dáil is in session”, as a Government statement said at the time. Otherwise, their entire departments were to be located outside the capital.

Almost 50 State agencies or semi-State companies, such as Bus Éireann, the National Roads Authority and the Land Registry, were also to be moved out of Dublin. The Office of Public Works (OPW), which had the job of overseeing this unprecedented upheaval – all meant to be achieved by the end of 2006 – was slated to relocate to Trim, Co Meath.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition kept it all under wraps until budget day. In fact, as the then minister for the environment, Martin Cullen, admitted to me, when I asked him who had concocted the programme, “there were only four of us involved: Bertie , McCreevy, Mary Harney and myself.” He chuckled at the thought.

That it came only a year after the government had published Ireland’s first National Spatial Strategy made the Big D incomprehensible. The strategy had designated nine “gateways” for growth (including Dublin) and nine subsidiary hubs. And Ahern had pledged in November 2002 that Government policies would be consistent with this strategy.

On budget day, Cullen spuriously claimed that “now we see real life being given to it right throughout the country. It hits all of the hubs, all of the major areas that have been identified, the major county towns”. But he was being economical with the truth: only one department (Education and Science) was earmarked for an NSS gateway (Mullingar).

Mary Coughlan, then minister for social and family affairs, let the cat out of the bag when she admitted that the aim was to decentralise to locations where an influx of relatively well-paid public servants would have the greatest impact; in other words, to smaller towns such as Ballina and Ballyshannon rather than to the likes of Galway or Cork, where they would barely be noticed.

The Irish Timescolumnist Fintan O'Toole saw the plan as "a classic Fianna Fáil operation, in that it appeals vaguely to a broad swathe of the population and sharply to an insider elite . . . the little inner circle of property developers that has a special place in the government's heart . . . Ask the old question, 'cui bono?' – 'who benefits?' – and the whole thing starts to make sense."

By choosing 53 centres for “decentralisation” ministers were ensuring that the State’s largesse would be spread widely. The beneficiaries would be local auctioneers, estate agents, builders, shopkeepers, publicans, car dealers, property developers and landowners with sites for sale – all of whom would gain from having a clutch of public servants moving in.

Tom Parlon, then the Progressive Democrat minister of state for the OPW and now director-general of the Construction Industry Federation, lost no time in putting up “Welcome to Parlon Country” billboards throughout his Laois-Offaly constituency, as if they were all arriving the day after tomorrow. He also churned out leaflets hailing the jobs “delivered” for Birr and Portlaoise by the proposed relocation of Fás and the Department of Agriculture.

Former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald regarded the whole programme as “a most flagrant example of the ‘stroke mentality’ which afflicts so much of Irish politics and 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 . . . has provided further justification for the cynicism of the electorate.”

Fulminating against the government’s failure to recognise the value of a capital city, he wrote: “The truth is that transfer of policy-making, involving 3,000 of the 10,300 jobs, is totally counterproductive and will be seriously damaging to the national interest. Only politicians obsessed with political advantage and lacking in concern for the public good could have dreamt up such a hare-brained process.”

FitzGerald added that “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”. If they chose to stay in Dublin, he believed, many “will become supernumerary”.

Another former taoiseach, John Bruton, warned that the government’s programme would destroy “one of the greatest institutions of the State”, the Civil Service, and he ranked this as the “single greatest act of administrative and political vandalism” since the foundation of the State. And it wasn’t decentralisation at all; it was merely the relocation of parts of the public service to a series of different places.

In the Dáil a week after McCreevy’s bombshell announcement Bertie Ahern argued that “moving a large core of departments out to regional locations is good for departments”. It would also be “better for the staff in terms of quality of life and will make for better balanced development in the country”. McCreevy himself suggested that public servants could cash in on a “bonanza” by selling houses in Dublin.

The anti-city bias at the heart of the Big D didn’t apply solely to Dublin. Under the plan, 70 Department of Agriculture staff based in Cork city were to be relocated to Macroom; this is one of the numerous moves now “deferred” pending a review.

Cork, the Republic’s second city and one of the primary gateways in the spatial strategy, was later fobbed off with 44 staff from the Health Information and Quality Authority.

About 4,500 public servants had already been “decentralised” from Dublin during the 1990s; their work was largely in the back-office category and could quite easily be relocated. But the government was now planning to relocate half of all the remaining Civil Service staff still based in the capital, including entire departments, something that had never been contemplated previously.

Not surprisingly, senior civil servants were horrified by the prospect of having to move to the country. The Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants, which represents about 12,000 of them, expressed “anger and dismay” at the implication that they were the property of the FF-PD government, “to be distributed as trophies in advance of local elections” six months later, in June 2004.

In an e-mail survey, the association found that 35 out of 40 principal and assistant principal officers in the Department of the Environment did not want to move to Wexford, or to any other location outside Dublin. “The higher up you go, the more people are bedded down and have families and it becomes more of an issue”, the association’s general secretary, Seán Ó Riordáin, said at the time.

And although the Government stated that it “will be implemented on a voluntary basis”, there was coercion. Promotions became conditional on agreement to relocate to wherever an agency, department or section was due to move, and those who decided to stay in Dublin were “redeployed” to other posts, often in unfamiliar bureaucratic territory. For professional staff, this was particularly demoralising.

But it didn’t seem to matter about the impact relocation would have on so many lives – some 60,000 people in all, Ó Riordáin estimated, including spouses, children and grandparents – or about the loss of “corporate memory” in different departments as civil servants were shuffled around like pawns in a political chess game. The government was determined to implement its plan, come hell or high water.

Some public servants did go quietly. Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority, moved its headquarters from Ballsbridge, in Dublin, to Oak Park, in Carlow, where its main research centre is located. But entrenched opposition, particularly from senior staff in other State bodies, meant that plans to relocate them elsewhere were held up for years or didn’t proceed at all.

Of the 36 “decentralisation” projects now deferred pending the outcome of a Government review of the programme, the majority involve quasi-independent State agencies or semi-State companies. These include the Arts Council, none of whose 49 staff have moved to Kilkenny as originally planned, and Bord Bia, which was supposed to be relocating to Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, with 76 staff.

Others now likely to avoid upheaval if the review seeks to save a further waste of public funds include Fáilte Ireland, which was to relocate to Mallow, Co Cork; the Sports Council (Killarney); the Central Fisheries Board (Carrick-on-Shannon); the Higher Education Authority (Athlone); and the National Educational Welfare Board (slated for Portarlington). Also deferred are moves by the National Standards Authority of Ireland to Arklow; the Equality Tribunal (Portarlington); the Local Government Computer Services Board (Drogheda); the National Qualifications Authority of Ireland (Edenderry); the National Building Agency (Wexford); the Ordnance Survey (Dungarvan); and the Valuation Office and the Public Appointments Service (both earmarked for Youghal).

Neither does it look as if Foras na Gaeilge will have to move to Gweedore, or the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission to Roscrea, the Irish Aviation Authority to Shannon, Bus Éireann to Mitchelstown, the National Roads Authority to Ballinasloe, the Railway Safety Commission to Drogheda, or 300 staff of the Health Service Executive to Naas. They’re all now more than likely to stay where they are.

In nearly all of the cases mentioned above, not a single staff member made the move. But the Government has also decided to review “decentralisation” plans for other agencies with relatively small advance parties in place at their new locations. These include Enterprise Ireland (Shannon), Fás (Birr), Sustainable Energy Ireland (Dundalk) and the Health and Safety Authority (Thomastown).

Others in this category include the Equality Authority (Roscrea), the Garda fines and vetting units (also in Roscrea), the OPW (Claremorris), Pobal (Clifden), a section of the Revenue (Athy) and, much more significantly, the headquarters of the departments of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (Cavan) and Social Protection (Drogheda).

Plans to relocate the headquarters of two other departments: Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs (Charlestown) are and Education and Skills (Mullingar) have been deferred or marked for review. But the Department of Agriculture’s relocation to Portlaoise has been “approved to proceed”, as have those of the departments of Defence (Newbridge) and Environment (Wexford), while the Department of Tourism, Sport and Culture’s relocation to Killarney is said to be complete.

At the end of June a total of 3,159 public servants had been moved to 37 locations. This represented just 29 per cent of the number that were meant to evacuate the capital when Charlie McCreevy unveiled the Big D. Inevitably, they included 238 posts at the new Trim headquarters of the OPW, which has had the task of finding all the accommodation – at a cost of countless millions of euro.

We may get a more definitive idea of how much all of this madness has cost when the Comptroller and Auditor General releases his report on the financial result of “decentralisation”, expected next week.

The Big D

The series continues next week in the News pages of The Irish Times

• Monday
• Decentralisation: the costs
• Tuesday
• Decentralisation: the buildings