The Government's plan to move entire agencies from Dublin to other locations is a nonsense and cannot be done, a trade union leader claimed yesterday.
Mr Dan Murphy dismissed as a "cynical political exercise" the decision to transfer both the Equality Authority and Equality Tribunal to Roscrea, Co Tipperary. It had more to do, he said, with getting a councillor elected in Roscrea than any plan to improve services to the public.
Mr Murphy, general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union, said the overall decentralisation programme would be impossible to achieve in the three-year timeframe envisaged.
Any attempt to make people move on anything other than a voluntary basis would inevitably lead to industrial action, he warned. In the Civil Service alone, he said, the intention was to transfer some 7,500 people from a Dublin-based staff of 20,000.
His own union was neither for nor against the idea, he said, and recognised that different staff had different needs.
However, it had conducted a small-scale survey of members on the issue a couple of years ago, "and we didn't get the impression that there was a dam welling up of people madly anxious to transfer out of Dublin".
The union had asked the Government to conduct its own survey of staff preferences after a previous decentralisation announcement, but it had refused to do so, he said.
He personally believed the scale of the transfers would be impossible to achieve, particularly within three years. As difficult as it would be to move thousands of staff from Government Departments, however, it was nonsense to expect that entire agencies could be moved.
The plan to move the two equality bodies, for example, was a joke and would make both the authority and the tribunal far less accessible to the public.
Asked to comment yesterday on the decision, the Equality Authority chief executive, Mr Niall Crowley, said staff knew very little at this point. He did not know how many of the authority's 51 staff would be prepared to move to Roscrea.
Other sources said yesterday there was "a good deal of anger" among the staff of various agencies who had been told, without consultation, that their jobs were being moved.
It was not clear last night how specialist staff in bodies like the Valuation Office, the Land Registry, the Irish Aviation Authority or the Equality Tribunal would be dealt with, given the assurance by the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, that all transfers would be voluntary.
A spokeswoman for his Department said matters of detail such as this would be examined by the implementation committee, to be chaired by Mr Phil Flynn, which was due to report by March 31st.
Mr Blair Horan of the Civil and Public Service Union, which represents clerical officers on lower grades, said it had not received any negative feedback from members about the announcement.
He warned, however, that decentralising staff on that scale would prove costly as it would lead to extra staff having to be hired in the short term.