Original Government Announcement Budget 2004

New Departmental Headquarters

The headquarters of eight Departments and the OPW are being transferred out of Dublin, leaving seven Departments with headquarters in Dublin. 

Note: Ministers with headquarters outside of Dublin will be provided with a centralised suite of offices, close to the Houses of the Oireachtas, for a small secretariat so they can conduct business while in Dublin and when the Dáil is in session.

General Notes

A wide range of factors were taken into account and balanced against each other in selecting Departments/agencies for decentralisation and locations for the new decentralised offices. These factors included:
(a) in selecting Departments and agencies for decentralisation:
- the imperative that customer service standards are not adversely affected by decentralisation;
- the core business and nature of the relevant Departments/agencies;
- the location of their customer base;
- the need to ensure that the units involved are large enough to provide career opportunities for staff either within their own Department or in another Department within a reasonable distance;
and
(b) in selecting locations for decentralised offices: .
- the need to achieve a fit with the National Spatial Strategy, in terms of the Gateways, Hubs and their respective catchments;
- the location of existing decentralised offices;
- the desirability of clustering a Department's decentralised units within a region;
- the importance of respecting the scale and character of locations in terms of their capacity to absorb the number of new jobs involved;
- the existence of good transport links – by road, rail and/or air – and the general infrastructural capacity in the areas selected.

Industrial Relations

The programme will be implemented on a voluntary basis. There will be no redundancies and, as on previous occasions, the payment of removal or relocation expenses will not arise.
The existing partnership structures within each Department/agency will deal with any implementation related issues which are specific to that Department/agency. Any public service-wide issues will be addressed under the auspices of the Public Service Monitoring Group provided for in Sustaining Progress.

Details of Original Programme by Department

The following list outlines the Departments, agencies and jobs which it was proposed to transfer out of Dublin. It also shows the target number of jobs for each location. An Implementation Group was being established to drive forward the implementation process, with the Chair of the Committee reporting to a special Cabinet sub-Committee. The Government may make some adjustments to the detailed provisions below where necessary to ensure continued effective delivery of public services.

The programme includes 500 health sector staff but, in view of the current position in relation to the health reform programme, the Government has decided not to make any decisions at this time about exactly what staff should be decentralised and to what locations these jobs should be assigned. However, the Government has decided that the new Health Service Executive (incorporating the National Hospitals Office, the Primary, Community and Continuing Care Pillar and the Shared Services Centre) and the Health Information & Quality Authority will all be located outside Dublin.

The Government also decided that, save in exceptional circumstances, any new agencies/bodies being established in future should be located in areas compatible with the new programme of decentralisation.

December 2003