ON the night that the Beef Tribunal report was to be released to the national newspapers back in August 1994, there were major delays.
The photocopiers kept breaking down the report ran to over 900 A4 pages, four inches deep. And when the waiting journalists finally received their copies, they had only a few hours to make sense of a stack of paper as thick as two telephone directories.
One conspiracy theory at the time was that the report didn't come on a floppy disk - which would have been far cheaper and quicker to produce - because the powers that he didn't like the idea of reporters doing fast searches by keywords.
The other theory was that the powers that he didn't know how to do it.
Equally, the Government is dragging its feet about putting various other information which it has already collected - and which its taxpayers have already paid for - onto the Internet for its citizens to use.
Why is this? Is there some great technological hurdle involved?
Not really, judging by the efforts of ordinary school students around the country, who are showing that setting up a home page on the World Wide Web is, well, child's play.
Spin a Web
Just over a week ago, teams from 10 schools huddled around PCs and Macs in a crowded room in the Computer Science department of TCD, for the final of Ireland's first Spin a Web competition. The overall winner was Sarah Murphy (16) from Sacred Heart, Clonakilty. Her solo effort was about whales and other marine life, and she went to the Web itself to research much of the material.
The other teams' subjects ranged from a resource study of Cootehill in Co Cavan to a first aid manual, and the finalists were fairly evenly split between boys and girls. Viewed offline, some of the pages had major flaws, such as a lack of links in sub directories; and when put, on line, many of the pages take a while to download. Even so, the better ones were as imaginative as - or even better than - many commercial sites on the Web.
To see the students' efforts, point your Web browser at http://www.cs.tcd.ie/www/cnnnghmp/spinweb-top.htm/
"We were astonished at how computer literate the students were," Pat Garvey of the competition's sponsors, Sharptext, said afterwards. "Their projects were innovative and dynamic, and they displayed much enthusiasm and interest in the Web and the Internet."
The Net has many obvious benefits for schools. Besides being the electronic equivalent of a vast global library - with online access to several thousand real life libraries, from the Vatican Library to the Library of Congress - it offers many other information resources. Some Web sites even allow pupils to submit those difficult homework problems by e mail (see, for example http://www.yahooligans.com/School_Bell/homework_Answers and wait for the answers from the online experts).
The Internet also provides a cheap way of communicating with other schools around the world via e-mail. Web sites such as Kidlink (http://www.kidlink.org) promote "a global dialogue" across 82 countries, and over 50,000 young people have participated in the project.
"One of the things we'd love to see happening is for teachers in one teacher schools, particularly the island schools, having access to technology for linking and making contact with other, schools," says Sally Shiels, president of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation.
Students learn about technologies which are an increasingly important part of the world of work, and for teachers the Net is a great way of finding teaching materials and communicating with other educators in their field. Web sites such as The Hub (http://hub.terc.edu), for example, have many links to useful pages for educators about mathematics, science and technology.
Lagging behind
But there is a down side to the equation. "Irish schools lag far behind other European countries in their use of new technologies," Sally Shiels says. "The Department of Education funds trolleys for computers to be put on, but it doesn't give any grant aid for the computers themselves."
While she welcomes the recent initiatives by Ireland On Line and other Internet service providers to give schools free Internet access, "it's a shame that the Department of Education hasn't taken any initiative."
She is also critical of the lack of in service training for teachers, and due to the lack of resources she expected schools to go online on a phased basis.
Some schools use alternative sources to fund the costs of going online. For example at St Andrew's College in Blackrock, Co Dublin, the Internet accounts and the school's software and hardware equipment are paid for by an outside company, which is allowed in turn to research the students' use of the Internet. The only cost for the school, therefore, is the phone bills charges, but these can soon add up its computers are in use for "about three hours a day", according to one of the school's computer teachers.
Besides capital costs, the pricing structure of Telecom Eireann is a major financial headache for schools wanting to go online. Local phone calls during normal teaching hours cost 11.5p for three minutes (calls are costed per unit, so three minutes 10 seconds costs the same as six minutes). This is five times more than at night time or weekends, working out at £2.30 an hour for each computer online.
Several Internet service providers have argued that Telecom Eireann should adopt a policy of much lower tariffs for schools - and even home users - particularly during business hours.
Telecom says it still hasn't made any firm decision on such a policy (see main story), and meanwhile the phone bills are mounting up for the schools - so even if they are making a local call, the daytime weekday rate is far too prohibitive.
Not only is the Government unwilling to put itself online between its Department of Education and the semi state telephone provider, the electorate of the future is being digitally disenfranchised too.