Two and a half years on, it seems cock-up, rather than coup, is probably the more appropriate term to describe the decentralisation plan. As Pat Rabbitte put it in the Dail last week, the plan is "a shambles. . . doing permanent damage to the cohesion of governance".

In the days after McCreevy's announcement, government sources were confidently predicting that "by the next general election, there will be bodies on the ground in new offices in every constituency".

That is certainly not going to happen now and, with news last week that the government had abandoned plans to transfer almost 100 probation officers from Dublin to Navan, decentralisation could yet turn out to be more electoral millstone than masterstroke.

In politics, you don't always get what you deserve, but, in the case of decentralisation, Fianna Fail and the PDs are getting their just desserts. The decision to scatter the decentralised civil servants across 53 towns was a pure stroke and, for putting political gain ahead of the national interest, the government fully deserves all the criticism it is getting.

It is obvious that too high a percentage of the population live in the greater Dublin area.

People move to the Dublin area for a variety of reasons, including access to work, education, culture and a perception that life is more exciting and diverse there.

The way of countering those 'push' and 'pull' factors is to develop alternative urban centres of scale and that can only be done by concentrating infrastructure and resources on a small number of cities and towns across the country.

As long ago as 1969, the Buchanan Report warned of the growing dependence on Dublin and advocated the establishment of a limited number of large centres throughout the country as a counterbalance.

However, there was a massive groundswell against its proposals.

Parochial self-interest took hold, as politicians, the public and, yes, the media too, couldn't bear the prospect of a neighbouring town being favoured. So instead, the plan was shelved and every town and city, with the exception of Dublin, lost out and an opportunity was wasted.

Before it launched its National Spatial Strategy, the government insisted it had learned from this mistake. In 2001, Noel Dempsey . . . the most innovative environment minister of recent times . . . said that 30 years after Buchanan, "we have the opportunity to redress the balance" with the National Spatial Strategy. Dempsey had moved to a different department by the time the government finally launched the spatial strategy. While the strategy proved to be something of a disappointment . . . with 22 growth centres it was hardly Buchanan revisited . . . the government then proceeded to ride roughshod over even that with its 'one for every constituency in the audience' decentralisation programme.

The plan has always been less about "balanced regional development", and much more about getting the government re-elected in 2007.

In his Dail comments on Wednesday, Bertie Ahern said that, as a deputy representing Dublin, he did not understand what people have against other parts of the country. "They are nice places to work and live and good places in which to be based."

Deliberately or otherwise, the Taoiseach is missing the point. Moving so many civil servants and, in many cases, their families, was always going to be difficult and messy.

But by opting for a scattergun, incoherent approach, the government has lost whatever chance it had of making decentralisation appealing to civil servants.

If the government had produced a combined spatial strategy and decentralisation plan where it picked six cities/towns . . .

Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo and a centre in the midlands . . . where it could cluster departments and state agencies, along with new industry and major infrastructure and cultural projects, then there is little doubt that the prospect of moving out of Dublin to exciting new growth centres would have been a lot more attractive.

But, instead the government played politics with the civil service. And, as my colleague Martin Frawley has pointed out on these pages, it is now left with up to 5,000 public servants who are unwilling to move out of Dublin and who are facing the prospect of being 'whitewalled' . . .

sitting in an empty office with nothing to do . . . by their employer at a cost of 250m a year to the taxpayer. The opportunity that was "too valuable to be passed up" has been lost and we as a nation are poorer for it.