The Government was swept along on the high-tech tide in 1999 but its targets proved aspirational as much as achievable, writes Harry McGee.
Back in 1999, everything seemed possible online. Ludicrously shallow ideas touted by dotcom entrepreneurs were attracting ludicrously vast amounts of money. The over-riding sentiment about the technology revolution seemed to mirror the famous words of the American journalist Lincoln Steffens as he returned from Soviet Union in 1921: "I have seen the future and it works."
And the government also got in on the act. In early 1999, it launched an action plan for implementing the information society in Ireland. This initiative opened up the possibility of so-called "eGovernment", giving the public and businesses the opportunity to access all information about public services online and to conduct all their transactions with departments, local authorities and agencies online.
It was one of those "brave new world" visions that the Government has come up with from time to time over the past decade - like decentralisation, electronic voting and PPARS. The press release oozed hyperbole.
In a couple of years, we would all be able to live our lives without ever prising ourselves away from our computer screens. Once eGovernment became operational Joe Public could apply for a driving licence or passport, pay taxes or make appointments for health services online.
And the Government was not shy when it came to setting a timetable for this vastly ambitious project, when it launched the second phase in March 2002. It promised that all services capable of online delivery would be available by the end of 2005, two and a half years later.
So, what happened next? Well, as yesterday's report on eGovernment from the Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell revealed, many of the flagship projects for eGovernment foundered on the same rocks of naive and unbridled optimism that did for so many dotcom companies.
The comptroller's report shows that the result of that ambitious eGovernment project has been very mixed to say the least. Of the 161 projects approved by mid-2006, a little under half (74) were fully delivered and operational.
Almost one in three (44) was only partly implemented while one in six (23) was abandoned.
The overall cost was €420 million or some 20 per cent more than budgeted; and, on average, the projects took 25 per cent longer than planned to implement.
In fairness, eGovernment has not been a tale of unmitigated woe. The comptroller does point out a couple of signal successes where there are strong interactive services available. And when these projects are good, they tend to be very good. That includes the efficient ROS online service operated by Revenue (300,000 tax payments, or 22 per cent of the overall take, were made online in 2005); the online motor tax payment facility; and the Department of Agriculture's online facilities for area aid and for animal disease eradication.
But when the plans turned out to be bad, they tended to be very bad - electronic voting.
A plan to set up a national health portal was abandoned in 2005 after €2 million had been spent; as were plans to allow people to apply for and pay for driving licences online. Another grandiose plan to allow people make passport applications online was also jettisoned.
Mr Purcell devotes a considerable portion of his attention to an entity with the unwieldy title of the Public Services Broker. Essentially this system was designed to provide a single access point to all government services. To the public it was to become known as www.reachservices.ie.
The "vision thing" was that a click of a button would bring you to a one-stop shop, where you could conduct every kind of imaginable business with government, its agencies, local authorities and health services.
But it did not work out that way. The comptroller concludes that its feasibility was never really examined early on, that its planning was weak and that implementation of the service was "far slower and costly than anticipated".
It was originally budgeted at €14 million and was due to be completed in August 2004. It ended up being signed off 16 months later at a cost of €37 million, more than two-and-a-half times more than budgeted. It costs up to €15 million a year to run and delivers a disappointingly limited service.
It is now under review - Mr Purcell pulls no punches when saying that "a clear strategic vision and plan" is urgently needed for it.
In its defence the Department of the Taoiseach (which took overall overall charge of the eGovernment project) argued that targets were ambitious, "even to the extent of leaning towards aspirational".
But that seems a fatuous argument - giving the Government a get-out clause for every failed or incomplete project and every cost over-run - including other politically contentious projects like decentralisation; electronic voting; and the biblical over-spending on the PPARS payroll system for the HSE.