Tech portfolio moved about but much needs improving and vital elements still missing

It's all change for the broad technology portfolio. As many had predicted, the tech brief has been shuffled, moved to a new department, had some bits added and some taken away.

While details of responsibilities are sketchy at this stage, some new policy directions are clear from the Taoiseach's new appointments.

We need all the lines we can get to read between, as a glance through the (few) sections dealing with information technology, communications and broadband infrastructure in the new Programme for Government did not exactly inspire.

We've heard most of this, ad infinitum, before. The programme offers little more than a bland rehash of the party manifestos and existing government policy on a number of pressing issues. It's all very worthy in a vague sort of way but a blueprint for policy this is not.

The most pressing issues get a quick coat of gloss or aren't mentioned at all.

But the departmental reshuffling gives more shape. Most important, communications is now in its own department along with Natural Resources, under the guiding hand of Mr Dermot Ahern. Along with most of the broadband infrastructure brief, the new department will also roll in broadcasting (in alignment with the rest of Europe, which sees broadcasting as a technology and communications management issue, not an arts issue).

The other major change - which was widely demanded and will be widely welcomed by the technology industry - is the appointment of an e-minister, Ms Mary Hanafin.

Given her position as chief whip she will have plenty of face-to-face time with the Taoiseach, and she is also seen as an energetic, tough, get-it-done minister, needed for (one hopes) co-ordinating policy across the huge technology portfolio.

But the role remains largely unformed at the moment, given that the Programme for Government does not mention such a position at all.

The Taoiseach said Ms Hanafin would help co-ordinate information society policy. But in the Programme, the enormous area of e-government and society gets only three sentences, promising an "ambitious" programme.

The programme is strongest in the research and development area, although still vague. For example, how about the shocking revelation that "we will build the capability of firms to carry out and manage R&D in Ireland"? We certainly hope so, but do tell more.

More promising is the commitment to "seek to improve structures and practices" to help commercialise publicly funded research. One hopes that might mean a legal and policy framework to support start-ups that emerge from academic research. This is long overdue - by about a decade. Encouraging too is a commitment to regularise research funding.

However, the education section never once mentions computers, or critical teacher training in the area of primary education, where it is really lacking (although it's generally mentioned for "schools" in the research section).

This underlines an existing problem of seeing IT as an add-on rather than as intrinsic to education policy.

Broadband infrastructure commitments are, well, broad. Does offering "open-access broadband on a national basis" mean for multinationals or citizens? More citizens would benefit immediately from a simpler vow to push through flat-rate, dial-up internet access.

So, nothing new in the Programme for Government, really. We'll have to wait and see the specifics of emerging policy in these new ministerial appointments - and better understand who really has responsibility for what - before we can judge the actual intentions of our "something old, something new" Government.