Madam, - The power of decentralising government departments and State bodies on the massive scale now proposed is one which no government should take upon itself to exercise, given the very obvious vested interests involved. This function should have been passed to an independent commission, and we would thus have been spared the spectacle of ministers etc. going down to their constituencies to crow about the number of public servants they have managed to grab for their own particular bailiwick, like little Caesars bearing captive slaves back to Rome.
It furthermore passes belief that this ground-breaking decision could have been taken without any reference to the staff concerned. Imagine the furore if the management of the ESB decided that that body should be packed off, lock, stock and barrel, to, say, Waterford, without any consultation with the unions concerned.
But not only is there to be decentralisation, there also is to be a carving-up of government departments which flies in the face of all that has been preached about economies of scale and indeed of the Government's own spatial strategy. Instead of a Department operating as a unified whole as at present, it will in future be a very scattered, disorganised, inefficient body with a little bit in this small town and a little bit in that small town. Consider the implications of all this for the morale of staff and esprit de corps, not to speak of the difficulty of interesting young people in taking employment in such organisations in future.
And the irony of all this is that the transfer of units of departments to small towns may in the end turn out to be of little benefit to such places, for the majority of staff concerned may choose not to live in a small town but in the nearest large town or city where educational, leisure and shopping facilities are bound to be far superior. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICK FAGAN, Ballytore Road, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.