A feasibility study into the installation of a fibre-optic cable along the Atlantic seaboard from Donegal to Kerry has begun, the Minister for Public Enterprise, Mrs O'Rourke, announced yesterday.
Speaking at the second annual Educational Technology Users' Conference in Sligo, Mrs O'Rourke said she expected to present the findings of the study by late summer. Bidding for the project could then begin early next year.
The high-speed telecommunications line would be built and operated under a public/private partnership, with one-third of the money coming from public funds.
The "Atlantic Corridor" was designed to serve parts of the State which up to now had not had the same high-speed Internet access as elsewhere, the Minister said.
Mrs O'Rourke said she was aware that people in the west felt they had been disadvantaged in roads, rail and in the provision of broadband telecommunications, but distance from Dublin would no longer be an issue with this high-speed line. "How could distance be an issue? You are at one in the marketplace. It will be the same in Singapore as in Sligo."
Mrs O'Rourke accepted that there was a shortage of broadband capacity in the west, which was having an impact on businesses. Once the new line was constructed, there was no reason why capacity in the west would not equal that of Dublin.
The EdTech 2001 Conference, organised by the Institute of Technology in Sligo, also heard that third-level colleges in Ireland would have to start offering courses over the Internet or they would lose students to foreign universities.
Mr Brian Mulligan, of IT Sligo, said that third-level colleges were under threat from the Internet. "Students will be just as likely to go to the Internet and buy good courses from the likes of Columbia University as they are to come to us", he said.
The colleges needed resources to fund the development of courses and to train staff. "Because of a lack of resources, we have fallen behind, and other countries are ahead of us in providing computer and Internet-based education", Mr Mulligan said.
Irish companies such as Smartforce and Riverdeep had secured large parts of the computer-based education market, but the State sector had not matched their initiative, he said.
Many of those who availed of courses via the Internet were mature students, but the Republic had a very poor record of attracting these people into third-level institutions. In this State, just 4 per cent of students in third-level institutions were over 23, but the average in OECD countries was 40 per cent.
The conference was also told of a joint initiative by 13 Institutes of Technology to run a pilot project offering education via the Internet. A steering group led by the director of the Institute of Technology in Tallaght, Dr Columb Collins, has applied to the Department of Education for £1.5 million for the pilot scheme, which will concentrate on three areas: manufacturing technology, e-commerce and staff development.
Dr Collins said staff development had to be dealt with first, as lecturers in the colleges were not yet not trained to provide courses over the Internet.