The Labour Court has ruled promotions in state agency Fas cannot be dependent on willingness to move out of Dublin.

Why would the Labour Court ruling herald the end of decentralisation?

The ruling means the government has little leverage in forcing personnel in state agencies to move to locations around the country. The programme was always defined as voluntary but in reality there was little take-up and management tried to use promotion as leverage to get personnel to move. That is now no longer an option.

The situation in the civil service is not as clear. The government claims 2,000 out of the proposed 10,300 jobs have already relocated to some of the 53 new designated centres around the country. But it remains unclear how many of those 2,000 posts involved personnel moving from one location outside the capital to another, as opposed to the designed move from the capital to the various locations.

On Thursday, Brian Cowen said the programme would go ahead despite the latest setback. But he refused to be drawn on specifics and his spiel had the ring of empty rhetoric. To be fair, Cowen has been hoist on his predecessor's petard and would have to take huge flack if he climbed down. The smart money says relocations will be minimal now, instead of the grand flight announced in 2003.

But isn't decentralisation core government policy?

Actually, it isn't. Relocation is, which is what this so-called decentralisation was about. Decentralising implies a devolution of power from central government. That was never on the cards. Decentralisation is a top-drawer buzzword but all this programme involved was proposed relocation of whole government departments and agencies to 53 locations outside Dublin.

So who is responsible for the debacle?

Nobody. It was a political decision and by and large no politician has ever had to answer for a dreadful decision. Former finance minister Charlie McCreevy dreamed up the scheme. From the outset it had the look of something McCreevy jotted down on the back of a cigarette pack.

He announced the programme in his December 2003 budget. The general consensus was that the announcement was designed to deflect from a budget that was short on ideas and innovation.

But he must have consulted widely about such a major decision?

Nope. Charlie wasn't a great man for consulting with anyone beyond his bathroom mirror. There was no cabinet meeting. No trade unions or employee organisations were informed. No experts on planning or governance were consulted. Charlie just saw glory and went for it.

But why foist such a harebrained scheme on the country?

Old story. It made for a fantastic stroke.

The genesis of the whole thing goes back to November 2002, when the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) was announced.

This was a blueprint for sustained regional development, to ensure the whole country was given fair shake when it came to spreading out investment. One aspect of this would be that in future plans to relocate government departments or agencies from Dublin, the centres identified in the strategy would be given priority.

Both the content and the timing of delivery of the NSS should have been a godsend to the government. The report itself was a fudge. Instead of earmarking five or six cities or large towns around the country as centres for investment, the report named nine 'gateway' centres and nine smaller 'hubs'. This should have given the government enough leverage to spread any relocation plan widely across the state. The timing of the delivery of the plan was also favourable, coming at the beginning of the electoral cycle when bad press could be shipped by the government with the expectation of minimal fallout.

But that wasn't enough for McCreevy and his hypersensitive soldiers of destiny.

Mac didn't have the stomach for the fallout expected from towns which weren't designated in the report. Nor was he prepared to choose between competing hubs like Tralee and Killarney when it came to the ordered relocation of state agencies.

So he pulled a stroke. He decided on a mass exodus from Dublin to 53 corners in the state (the heartland of at least nine ministers among them) and consulted nobody. There was something in the audience for everybody. Votes could be harvested in all constituencies on the back of the plan. Developers would be grateful for the work and would do their duty accordingly, filling party coffers. And the opposition would be in no position to object.

Who could be against more jobs coming to their constituency? A fool could spot the disastrous consequences for the smooth running of the state but that wasn't McCreevy's problem. The plan was brilliant, cynical and, in terms of the minister's constitutional duty, entirely reckless.

Did anybody shout stop?

Lots of sensible people, who took the novel approach of researching and projecting the outcome of the programme, described it as madness, with Edward Walsh of the University of Limerick telling an Oireachtas committee in July 2004 the proposal "threatened the future wellbeing" of government and governance in the state. Of course, Walsh was coming at the matter from the point of view of the common good and proper governance, silly concepts in the minds of some politicians when set in conflict with the grubby business of harvesting votes.

Should heads roll?

Too late. McCreevy is long gone to the EU.

Tom Parlon, tasked with implementing the programme, lost his Dail seat and is now director general of the Construction Industry Federation, a body anxious to see the programme generate loads of work for the boys. Noel Ahern is now in charge and thinks there's no problem there he can't solve. It seems the approach now is to keep saying the job is oxo, irrespective of the crumbling reality.