School principals in Ennis have welcomed the educational opportunities offered by the town's win in the Information Age Town competition. "It will remove immediately the inequality of access to computers caused by some children having computers at home simply because their parents can afford to pay for them," said Mr Matt Power, acting principal at Ennis Community College. He saw great possibilities for children doing their homework to be able to go over the day's lesson on the Web and children with long-term illnesses keeping up with school work.

The principal of Scoil Chriost Ri, Mr Pat Hanrahan, said his 300-pupil primary school had not received a single pound for computer equipment from the Department of Education. The school had raised funds to buy six computers. He hoped Telecom Eireann's £15 million investment in equipment and infrastructure for the town would allow his school to increase its computers to nearly 25, about two per classroom.

The principal of Holy Family primary school, Ms Margaret Cooney, one of the team who put forward Ennis's bid for the award, said she believed local schools would gain most.

Her school had seven or eight out-of-date computers, some donated by GPA, and a designated room ready for new computers. She hoped they would be networked so that each teacher could take a whole class in IT at the same time.

She said computer training for teachers was high in Ennis as the local education centre was part of a European programme for training teachers in IT skills. The children were also ready: a survey done in preparation for the information town competition had shown that more than 40 per cent of the town's homes had a computer.

Mr Pat Lafferty, a computer science teacher at the 950-pupil St Flannan's College, is looking forward to putting a class of 30 onto the Internet simultaneously. He hoped Ennis's largest school would become a training centre for the thousands of locals who would be getting computers for the first time.