Plans to establish a Dublin-Belfast "digital corridor" got under way yesterday, with the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, meeting the Northern Secretary, Dr Mo Mowlam, in Dublin. The proposal involves the creation of a high-capacity telecommunications network linking the two cities to other broadband centres in the United States and Europe.

Ms O'Rourke said electronic commerce could be worth $200 billion (£135 billion) by 2001 as more companies used the Internet for business, and that she and Dr Mowlam had planned further meetings to develop the idea.

"There will be many economic benefits to this island from the development and roll-out of the information age," she added. "The development of a major digital corridor between Belfast and Dublin would underpin in a very practical manner the economic corridor and would complement the infrastructural investments in the high-speed rail and road transport between the two cities."

Later, at a lunch hosted in Dublin by the Institute of Directors, Dr Mowlam paid tribute to the business community on both sides of the Border, which she said had often kept together the fabric of society in the face of unrest. She said she recognised that there was already a great deal of cross-Border trade and felt that the two governments should now help in whatever way they could to encourage this.

Since the signing of the Belfast Agreement, she added, there was now evidence of a fundamental shift in attitudes. There was more real official co-operation between North and South than ever, the success at the polls of the agreement had given an important background of public support and the Omagh bomb had generated a further hardening of general opinion in favour of the peace process.

"The agenda is changing. I was at the British-Irish parliamentary meeting and when it came to the questions I thought it would be just `decommissioning, decommissioning', but it wasn't! They wanted to know about agricultural payments, for example," she said.

Dr Mowlam said she had had a long discussion with the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, on the introduction of the euro and how to minimise the obstacles to cross-Border trade.

In a reference to the possibility that Britain might join the single currency, she added: "We're trying to put in place arrangements so that if the decision is made, the structures are there."

She and Mr Ahern had also discussed the millennium bug computer problem, Dr Mowlam said, and how businesses on both sides of the Border could co-operate on the issue.