"IF YOU walk around the town now, there is as much evidence of it as, well, nothing."

Mimi Conroy is behind the counter of the Computer Store in Ennis, a shop she and her husband have been running since 1993. It's been 10 years since the town won the Eircom competition of Information Age Town, and Mimi is right, you wouldn't know it by walking around the town today. "It was a great thing to win, " she says, "but it was an awful lot of money." She pauses as a customer comes into the shop. "But where did all the money go?"

There are endless criticisms in Ennis over how the scheme and the money that was poured into it was managed. Nineteen million euro to be exact. When Ennis was chosen to be the great white hope of digital communication technology in Ireland in 1997, the people of the town rejoiced, and the Ennis Information Age Task Force was set up to allocate various projects. The one that resonated most was free computers for every house. In fact, 5,600 PCs were distributed - at a cost at the time of £260 (Euro330) to each household. Five hundred computers were also given to new computer labs in local schools.

Locals say that some people, especially the elderly, gave away their cut-price computers to relatives in other parts of the county.

The committee promised to set up a base to monitor internet usage and identify the people who weren't using their computer, but that pledge was never fulfilled.

Now the vast majority of those machines lie broken in computer repair shops, never having been upgraded by Eircom. Because the computers were bought from Dell, business for local technology shops collapsed, there no longer being any demand for computers. Problems also arose for those with lower incomes.

"They'd come in here, " Conroy said, "but the price of two ink cartridges was the price of meat on the table for a week.

They couldn't afford repairs, they couldn't afford internet bills. Because it was a dial-up connection at the start, people in houses with no phone line had to get one installed, and that was a further cost."

Some of the Information Age computers which broke down were never repaired or replaced. Staff in the tourist office don't have much of an opinion on it. "There were a lot of problems with the machines, weren't there?" one says. "I don't think it did anything for the town really now."

Ennis was also promised a fibre-optic loop which would encircle the town and provide extra-fast internet connections. There is still confusion over whether that came into effect at the time. A former Eircom worker told The Sunday Tribune, "It did go in, I think; anything that was promised did happen." Triona McInerney, who worked on the town's entry submission to the competition is also not certain. "I think it did go in, " she said.

Something that definitely did not work out was the collaboration between Visa, Bank Of Ireland and AIB for a 'Visa Cash Card', or Smart Card.

The idea was that Ennis locals would be able to top up a credit-card-like product designed for small purchases like grocery shopping or parking.

However, usage was low and within less than a year, the scheme fell apart.

The bulk of the funding went on the cut-price computers. Other initiatives involved funding businesses to set up their own websites, and buying hardware for community groups. There were also trials with ASDL lines.

Three years into the five-year project, 80% of the funding was already gone. Two and a half million euros was pumped into a business plan that would see local businesses trading goods online, and a further Euro84,000 was made available to 17 local community groups to purchase computer equipment.

"The legacy of the Information Age Town project is very evident in the schools, " McInerney believes. "I do think there was an opportunity missed by the Department of Education in utilising Ennis more as a case study to learn about different applications.

There was probably a bit of an unreal expectation about what was going to happen because of the major hype surrounding the town. We didn't have an unlimited pot of gold."

Legacy In 2002, the Ennis Information Age Task Force created a subsidiary - Ennis Information Age Services (EIAS) - which would allocate the remainder of the funding, which at the time stood at around Euro2m. In 2005, that company ceased trading, with the loss of six jobs. The Department of Communications and people who worked with Eircom at the time are unsure as to where this funding went.

"As far as I'm aware, there was funding left over, and they would have put out a call for submissions from the community for funding, so I think school and community projects benefited, " said McInerney who was also the assistant CEO on the Information Age Town project. Local councillor Frankie Nealon is less sure about where the subsequent funding went. "It was the task force itself I had concerns with because they continued to fund something that they knew wasn't going anywhere. . . I would've imagined that a lot more could have been done with the money that they were given, so a lot of things would worry me in that sense, " he said.

The Sunday Tribune contacted several of the task force's original members, but many, including the CEO of EIAS, Michael Byrne, did not wish to speak to us. Internet expert Damien Mulley from the Ireland Offline pressure group views the entire project in retrospect as a bit of a disaster. "They picked the town, and that's fine, but I guess there didn't seem to be good oversight. It just seemed to be another government project where they didn't understand the technology. I hear people even now from Ennis saying how they can't get broadband."

Locally, people cite communication problems at managerial level regarding the allocation of funds. Because there was no physical centre of information to visit in the town, people weren't being made aware of what projects were being carried out, leading many to question what, if anything, was happening.

Today, the legacy of the project is in a generation of school children who are computer literate, although much of the population has long since caught up with them.

Certainly, there's nothing digitally spectacular about Ennis itself - most of its shops don't take Laser or chip and pin, phone credit is printed out in the old-fashioned way, and staff at the train station had no internet access to check updated timetables - in fact, the only thing that's visible today is a row of clapped out Information Age computers weighing down a shelf in a local computer shop.