Two weeks ago The Irish Times sent questions about the information society computer networks and related topics to the leaders of six of the main parties. Two parties acknowledged receipt of the questions, and one replied - the Green Party. Here are abridged extracts of the questions and answers from the Greens' science and technology policy specialist, Dr Rev Johnston.
Q: The Information Society document recently recommended an immediate capital investment of up to £500 million in infrastructure. Do you agree? And if elected to Government, when will you act?
A: We would need to look at this carefully; it involves enhancing bandwidths, optical fibres etc and an aspect of this is a perceived demand for interactive multichannel TV and such. We would need to look at this in the context of competing investment priorities. If the priority is in the direction of universal accessibility of top quality educational resources, then the investment would be sound. If on the other hand, the outcome was advertiser dominated massmedia proliferation, the value would be questionable. We would begin the evaluation of the strategy options immediately.
Q: What specific policies does your party have to help this country benefit most from the developing Information Society? A: The key one in the Green agenda is the Basic Income. The State would pay people a retainer to keep them available for productive work, a "social wage", on top of which they would earn an economic wage" if and when they were employed, or working for themselves. The effect of this would be to make many types of part time work acceptable and easy to obtain and to organise; a sort of legalised "black economy".
In this context, many people would be in a position to do part time work, and in their spare time to enhance their skills and areas of interest, by accessing educational services in their own time via the Web. This process could be enhanced by community based educational services.
Possession of the social wage, plus access to enhanced educational services supported by the Web would enable many people to invent their own jobs.
Q: The Rainbow Coalition had a junior minister in charge of science and technology. If elected will this portfolio be treated in a different way? And will sufficient resources be allocated to the area?
A: We would advocate that there be a Minister at Cabinet level responsible for science and technology [. . .] Basic science, which as well as contributing to our understanding of the world trains people in the problem solving process, is grossly under resourced in Ireland. We would fund it as a percentage of the expenditure on applied science, distributed via an independent Research Council, by a peer review process.
Q: The Freedom of Information Act will make millions of documents available to the public for the first time. How do you intend to manage and facilitate this?
A: There is scope here for making effective use of the Web, but more attention needs to be paid to how to index the information for transparent accessibility. The existing Government website leaves a lot to be desired. We would need to put resources into engineering the knowledge structure for public accessibility.
There is plenty of sophisticated know how around in a position to help with this task; it is a question of bringing together the sources and users of information and agreeing on design objectives for a retrieval system.
Q: What are the down sides to the communications revolution?
A: The principal dawn side I see is the universal intrusion of the mobile phone and the end of privacy. There are suggestions that pulsed high frequency signals can interact adversely with the human nervous system, and we need to look into this.
Q: Tony Blair says his priorities for his term is education, education, education ... What are yours?
A: Education is of course high priority, but there are many factors which stand in the way of the most economically deprived people achieving access to it. The guaranteed basic income approach would remove many of these obstacles, and when it is implemented it will be necessary to enhance the local educational resources in currently deprived areas, so as to meet the expanding needs, which are already overstretching the resources of the voluntary community development groups.