"Very disappointed" was the response of a senior Government source to last month's report by the Commission on Devolution. Instead of listing certain powers that might be safely devolved to local authorities, the Commission adopted a root and branch approach to local democracy.
In effect, it recommended scrapping the bulk of the carefully orchestrated decentralisation programme which successive governments have pursued since 1987. And, with a general election less than 12 months away, the proposal held all the attractions of a rabid dog for the Coalition partners.
Just think of the political damage that would flow from uprooting 2,800 civil servants who have been carefully, and politically, apportioned to 20 towns and cities around the State over the past nine years. Not alone would the goodwill of those civil servants and their families be placed in jeopardy, but the loss of their spending power to local communities would generate an enormous backlash.
The Commission should have been in no doubt as to the Government's view in the matter. Last April, nearly four months before its report was published, Ruairi Quinn told the Dail that "decentralisation has made a significant, positive contribution to economic growth and employment creation in the centres which have benefited from it. No question there of scrapping the political exercise.
Yet here was the Commission, chaired by a former president of ICTU, Phil Flynn, and including a Secretary of the Department of Finance, John Hurley, placing black question marks against the decentralisation exercise. They were backed up by Paddy Teahon, Secretary of the Taoiseach's Department, and by Brendan O'Donoghue, Secretary of the Department of the Environment.
For a start, the Commission urged that all housing related activities should immediately be devolved to local authorities. This would involve removing civil servants from the decentralised offices of the Department of the Environment in Ballina.
Learning from that experience, other centrally administered functions relating to tourism, sanitary services, transport/roads, industrial development, education, social welfare, environment, health, agriculture and justice might also be devolved. It was a bit tentative, but the political hook was barbed and gleaming.
The Commission's report didn't even get to Government. A Cabinet sub committee considered its implications and hopped the ball back into the Commission's court. A chilly statement from the Taoiseach's Office asked it to look specifically at real devolution "to make appropriate distinction" between "functions", which involve no local discretion, and "powers" which do involve local discretion.
It was further requested, in its final report, to take "due account of the need not to unnecessarily disrupt existing arrangements for decentralisation of functions of Government to provincial towns."
In other words, the people of the towns and cities of Athlone, Ballina, Castlebar, Cavan, Cork, Dundalk, Ennis, Galway, Kilkenny, Letterkenny, Limerick, Longford, Nenagh, Roscommon, Sligo, Tullamore, Waterford and Wexford, who have benefited from the programme of decentralisation, are not to be upset.
But that wasn't the only way in which the Commission got up the Government's nose. Asked to report primarily on the devolution of powers to local authorities, it dealt extensively with future administrative arrangements and proposed the establishment of mechanisms which would integrate local authorities with local development bodies.
It even advised the Government on how it might respond to a report (still pending) from a Commission on Local Government Reorganisation.
There is little doubt that a power play was involved. Elements of the permanent government" were looking ahead to the year 2000, when the entire State will no longer's be regarded as an "Objective One" area and EU structural funds may no longer flow through the Department of Finance. Development funding for Leader, County Strategy Groups and other agencies might also be tidied up, with the injection of a fair element of Civil Service control.
The Government is still in denial on the structural funds issue, even though the EU Commissioner involved, Monica Wulf Mathies, has said that parts of Ireland will no longer be eligible for the present level of funding after 1999. But the "permanent government" can read the Brussels wall graffiti very well.
THE Commission's report made perfectly good sense, from a bureaucrat's point of view. It recommended regional, county and local structures of local government and proposed the integration of new community development functions with older systems.
Elected representatives, who had been specifically excluded from some of the new, local development agencies county managers have largely taken control were to be given belated representation, in return for concessions to the social partners and community bodies.
"All levels should operate on the basis of an integrated multi purpose development plan prepared on a rolling basis and to coincide with the national and Structural Funds Programme," the Commission urged.
We're talking "national plan" here. And whatever about pious aspirations to "wide consultation" the past reality was always centralised control. It's a top down, rather than a bottom up, approach. And the newly integrated local government system would be fully engaged, with no particular new powers envisaged for elected representatives.
The Government wasn't buying it. The essential requirement for local government renewal, it insisted, was "the enhancement of the role of elected members in setting policy for local services and giving political leadership to socio economic development.
Furthermore, Brendan Howlin was asked to prepare a report on "the primacy of the electoral process" and how it should be reflected in local government.
As for the "permanent government", the Minister was asked "to make recommendations on how the distinct role of elected members relative to the officials of local authorities and other bodies engaged in public service delivery and socioeconomic development at local level can best be expressed and supported."
It should make for an interesting struggle.