However, the decision to disperse 10,000 civil servants across 53 towns is a purely political stroke, which was always less about balanced regional development and much more about getting the government reelected next year.

It is blindingly obvious that the only way of countering the dependence on Dublin is by developing a small number of alternative urban centres of scale and concentrating infrastructure and resources on these centres. This should have been the basis for the government's very own plan for regional development, the National Spatial Strategy.

However, for political reasons, that was never going to happen and instead the government opted for a total of 22 growth centres.

Decentralisation . . . involving the upheaval of people with families and strong ties to their communities . . . was always going to be a difficult process. But whatever chance the government had of making the scheme appealing to public servants was lost when it opted for a scattergun approach. It played politics with the public service. The result is that as many as 5,000 public servants are now unwilling to move out of Dublin.

It is clear the government needs to rethink the whole decentralisation programme as a matter of urgency. There are no easy solutions and it will be difficult for ministers to back down from their proposals without losing face.

But to put it bluntly, it's their mess and it's their job to fix it.