After all the hoopla about Ennis, Co Clare, being awarded the status of "information age town" a year ago, local schools are tens of thousands of pounds in debt because of an ironic "lack of communication".
The Clare Champion said students were being moved to prefabs because 470 multimedia PCs, installed by Telecom Eireann at a cost of £15 million, have taken over the classrooms, which have been turned into "computer laboratories".
Scoil Chriost Ri, Ennis National School and the Christian Brothers' Primary School have had to spend some £60,000 "from their own budgets" in accommodating the PCs.
Under-funded national schools made headlines in the Meath Weekender, which declared a "state of emergency", and in the Waterford News & Star, which claimed schools were "forced to turn away pupils".
"Appalling situations outlined at standing-room only meeting," said the Longford Leader, whose spelling was also appalling. Parents and teachers "vented their anger and frustration at seeing children being neglected by the State", it said. Among the "shocking" facts which emerged was that "untrained and unqualified substitutes were put in charge of classrooms during 770 school days in Longford".
The plight of families living in sub-standard rented housing was described by Mr Tom Enright TD, who claimed that Co Offaly was facing the worst housing crisis in 30 years. There were 379 applicants waiting for an approved figure of 24 houses - seven houses fewer than last year.
The Argus said a four-year wait faced the 679 applicants on Dundalk Urban District Council's waiting list, most of them single parents with one child. At the same time, private house building was booming and prices of sites were soaring as Co Louth became part of Dublin suburbia.
The spread of the drugs culture from the cities to rural areas is perplexing communities on both sides of the Border. "Rising tide of drugs reaches Cullybackey," said the Ballymena Guardian.
At an anti-drugs meeting at a local community centre, a woman resident of Cullybackey said: "It seems the drugs have come along all of a sudden as far as Cullybackey is concerned and I don't know where to go to or who to go to and I don't want to contact the police because I'm afraid there might be repercussions."
The Guardian said community drugs campaigns which forced alleged drug dealers out of their homes were ineffective because the dealers got round this by using mobile phones and dealing from their cars, with the help of 10-year-old distributors on bicycles.
Anti-drugs campaigners are preparing to bring their methods to Thurles, Co Tipperary. The Dublin-based Coalition of Communities Against Drugs "brings members of their group from all over the country and protests outside the household of an alleged drug pusher until that individual leaves the town", the Tipperary Star was told.
A young drug dealer who sold "dud amphetamines" on the streets was placing both himself and his mother in danger from "serious" drug dealers, Waterford District Court heard.
"Judge found the `stupidity and naivety' of this particular exercise fascinating," said the Waterford News & Star.
A Castlebar teenager who stole out of his house in the middle of the night with a gun he was not supposed to have, accidentally shot himself in the foot, hobbled to the nearest phone box and called the emergency services, then invented a story that he had been held up by a "man with a Dublin accent", said the Connaught Telegraph.
A vigorous lobbying campaign for the retention of Objective One status for 13 counties in the west, the midlands and the Border area made headlines in the Leitrim Observer, Mayo News, Sligo Champion, Anglo-Celt and Roscommon Herald.
The Government is to decide within weeks whether to divide the State into two regions - rich and poor, said the Anglo-Celt.
The Roscommon Herald said the Bishop of Elphin had thrown his weight behind the campaign, calling such a move "only fair, only just and only right".
If a lamb is cooked in Co Kerry, it's not enough to call it "Kerry lamb", the IFA chairman, Mr James Doyle, told the Kerryman. It was a "thundering disgrace" that farmers were losing out on the "lucrative tourism food market" because local hotels and restaurants were buying in cheaper meat and foreign produce which was likely to come from the diners' own countries of origin.
"Sean beats Bell in ding-dong contest," said the Kilkenny People. Labour's seasoned political analysts saw Mr Sean Butler (26) as a "no-hoper" when he challenged Mr Michael Bell TD to become Labour's Leinster representative in next year's European Parliament elections.
Mr Bell's Drogheda-based organisation didn't seem to notice that Labour in Cos Carlow and Kilkenny was backing an, Mr Butler, a sales executive. Mr Bell, who has resigned as chairman of the Labour Parliamentary Party, may now stand as an Independent candidate, said the Drogheda Independent.