The Government wants to ensure that all Irish children have a good working knowledge of information technology before they leave second-level education, the Taoiseach said yesterday.
Opening of a schools computer project for Dublin's inner city, Mr Ahern stressed the role the private sector could play in partnerships to provide computers for schools in disadvantaged areas.
He noted that Ireland was now the world's second-largest producer- exporter of information technology products after the US, "an enormous achievement for a small country".
"It is an accepted fact that computers are an excellent educational tool which can act as a very useful method of engaging and maintaining the attention of students. It is also now essential to have computer skills when seeking employment both at home and abroad," he said.
About 4,500 pupils in 20 inner city schools, 11 primary and nine post-primary, will benefit from the Dublin Inner-city Schools Computerisation (DISC) project, which will provide multi-media computers, software and IT training for 350 teachers over the next three years. The 48 computers and technical support will be supplied by Siemens.
Other partners are the Dublin Institute of Technology, which will direct the project, the National Centre for Technology in Education, which will provide grant-aid and a full-time co-ordinator, and the Dublin Inner City Partnership, which will provide £22,000 this year for administrative support, teacher training and software.
The director of the Inner City Partnership, Mr David Connolly, said his organisation's brief was to tackle long-term unemployment and it saw the computerisation project as "another very innovative way of tackling that issue".