When he was doing computer courses, his nine-year-old son was fairly able to get round what he was stuck on, John Millane tells Elaine Larkin

Nowadays a computer is an integral part of many families, but for the residents of Ennis, Co Clare, technology arrived that little bit sooner.

According to John Millane, whose three sons - Michael, now 20 and studying in UCC, Ruairi who is nearly 17 and 11-year-old Barry - there was a lot of euphoria when they heard Ennis was becoming the Information Age Town.

"Everybody became interested in technology and computers. Everybody talked about it. If you met them in the street or in the shops or whatever, it was all 'When are we getting the computers?'"

When the Millane family got their computer "for a very nominal figure", they bought a printer and other peripherals and got a phone socket put in the room where the computer was to be installed.

"The children reacted very positively because they had used computers in school already and they weren't intimidated," says John.

At first they all wanted to be on the computer at the same time, especially with games, says John. "Then they would have been getting more interested in getting into various websites."

Ruairi, who is very interested in soccer and the Premiership and is an avid Arsenal supporter, gets a lot of information about players and results from the various soccer websites.

Has having a computer in the home changed how homework is done? "The basic homework stays the same. But for school projects and things like that they would research stuff on the internet and houses now seem to have encyclopaedias on CD-ROM.

"They'd also type up projects. Barry can now type up his own projects and save them and print them up afterwards."

He is doing a project now at the moment on birds and, says John, of all the projects he has done "this seems to be the one where he is getting the most benefit from both the Internet and computers in general".

John finds that "children are at ease using computers and all the associated technology like scanners, cameras and stuff like that." This familiarity with technology changed how the boys stay in touch with friends.

They've been to France on holiday on quite a few occasions and since the arrival of the Internet the boys use e-mail to keep in contact with friends they made on their holidays

Although, he has done some computer courses, John himself has not had the time to do a European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) course; he is building a house, which he says that will have a room specially for the computer.

The difference in his own computer abilities and his sons' is great. Roles have been reversed as to who shows who the ropes: "When I was doing the computer courses myself, getting stuck, I often called Barry to help me out initially. He was normally fairly able to get round what I was stuck on." Barry was then nine years old.

Although Michael, his eldest son, now uses the computer for college projects, he was not as eager as his younger brothers to get involved in computers.

John attributes this difference in enthusiasm to the fact that there were fewer computers around when Michael was in national school, compared to Ruairi and Barry.

Even if they weren't involved in the Information Age Town project John believes that the family would have invested in a computer by now.

He has noticed that since children are using them in school parents now buy computers for young children to get them familiar with the technology.

Although his own sons haven't expressed any interest in IT as a career, he says: "You never really know. I still feel being computer literate today is absolutely essential, because in every job nowadays computers are used.

"Even though you mightn't be working directly in IT the fact that you can use a computer is a huge advantage."