Pressure is mounting on the Government to demonstrate its commitment to decentralisation by following up on the successful relocation of part of the Land Registry to Waterford.
There are many who feel the logical next step is to extend the experiment and upgrade the new regional office. "There's no reason why the whole of the Land Registry shouldn't be decentralised," said one source in the local office.
There were rumblings in Waterford last week over suggestions the new office might lose out in plans to staff up the Dublin headquarters of the registry as the property boom brings increasing pressure on the services.
More than 150 staff now work in the modern, purpose-built offices on the Cork Road in Waterford, which deal with maps and certificates for property transactions in 10 counties of the south and south-east. While there were some teething problems in the move - particularly in regard to staffing - the relocation has brought strong economic benefits to the city and a clear improvement in the efficiency of the service offered to the public in the region.
But there is a suspicion that senior Land Registry management is very reluctant to move from Dublin and that the Government may not be inclined to keep up the momentum in the face of that resistance. As it is, the registry just about managed to get the key people it needed for Waterford, and the local management there is still very much subordinate to Dublin.
However, when local politicians warned last week that the vast bulk of a series of senior appointments will be made in Dublin - resulting, it was suggested, in a "downgrading" of the Waterford office - there was a swift rebuttal from the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue.
"Any such suggestions are totally without foundation and appear to be made for the sole purpose of creating political mischief," he said in a statement.
"The truth of the matter is that the Waterford Land Registry office continues to be one of the major success stories of the Government's decentralisation programme. "Far from downgrading that office, I am actually increasing the number of staff assigned to it by 12, to bring the total staffing there to 162."
There was no shortage of takers from the Civil Service for the non-key posts in the Waterford office, and it appears there are many people from the south-east now in the office there.
However, the real test in developing the autonomy and status of the regional office will lie in the future allocation of senior staff there. It is generally known that Ministers like to have their policy-making senior staff, of principal officer level and above, close to them in Dublin. That, along with the reluctance of existing senior officers to relocate, may be the counter-pressure militating against a genuine strengthening of regional offices and further effective decentralisation.
HOWEVER, modern communications techniques, such as video links, tele-conferencing and email, facilitate instant consultation and contact. There is a strong argument that the public - who eventually bear the costs - should have ready access to services for which they are paying.
The debate might be clarified by an honest and open review of the costs involved in the move to Waterford in 1996-97 and since. Local sources argue that most of the extra expenses involved were once-off costs, and that these transition costs could be minimised by effective management in further relocation moves.
They also point out that there are real benefits to the taxpayer in avoiding the costs of rentals and buildings in the expensive Dublin market.
The Land Registry now works on a cost-recovery basis under its legislation - the Registration of Titles Act, 1964. As it develops towards semi-State status, the argument in Waterford is that the functions and status of the regional office should be clearly consolidated and strengthened rather than weakened.
The Department of Justice admits the Land Registry is "caught badly" for space in Dublin and emphasises that it is acutely aware of the cost benefits which the partial decentralisation has brought to the local economy. There are other ongoing benefits. The Waterford office has developed good relations with the local legal profession. And the office has been exempted from the "no public phone calls" policy in operation in Dublin - a policy designed to help workers to get on with the job and which restricted incoming calls to an hour in the afternoon.
Business and development organisations in the south-east continue to feel that the region has been left behind in the distribution of new jobs and resources as the economy grows, and they will be anxiously watching future policy directions in regard to the Land Registry.