I came from a background in physics and mathematics at a time when computers were enormous machines, few in number, locked away in secure environments and when programmers didn’t get out much. Prior to 1979 I had been working on high energy physics research projects in Canada and the US. I followed current affairs at home via an airmail subscription to the Irish Times and spotted an advertisement in late 1978. The newly established NBST was looking for staff. It seemed to be an exciting and promising initiative for promoting economic development. I joined the organisation in 1979.
At first I worked in the policy and in the research groups, studying, for example, how technological institutes could support businesses and, in particular, how the Danish government had established more than 30 bodies for different industrial sectors. In about 1984 I joined the agency’s electronics and IT division, which was involved in a wide range of policy and programme activities. Much of my time was taken up with the European Space Agency and the European Commission’s Esprit research programme, which brought European funding into IT development groups in Ireland for the first time. This country obtained over £80 million between 1984 and 1994 from the Commission’s Framework programmes, helping the development of research teams and paving the way for the nationally funded research centres that followed.
The late Mel Healy became head of the electronics and IT division in 1986. I had got to know Mel when I joined the NBST. His background was in the nuclear power industry in Canada. He was very interested in policy development, including its fundamental aspects, and in exploring international comparisons to the Irish situation.
When the European Commission announced the STAR programme and involved the NBST as an implementing agency for Ireland, Mel really got his teeth into it. The Directorate for regional development, rather than the research Directorate, initiated and financed this programme. It wanted to assist those areas of the European Community whose telecoms infrastructure and services lagged behind the rest.
STAR was quite a small action, but Mel saw that it had the potential to kickstart commercial online services. He brought a missionary approach to STAR, trying to persuade people from companies and universities to get involved.
Vincent Murphy at the Letterkenny Regional Technical College was an example of those who showed exceptional vision and energy. STAR was scheduled to begin in 1987, but we launched the programme in November 1986 with a three day conference in Letterkenny. Vincent directed this event, whose theme was the impact of information technology in remote regions. It included a technology exhibition, videoconferencing demonstrations – my first experience of giving a talk by videoconference – and live connections with the European Space Agency. The Commission sent over some of its top officials.
STAR allocated €42.5 million for infrastructural investment in Ireland – this strand was managed by Telecom Eireann – and €7.5 million to promote the supply of, and demand for, advanced telecommunications services. This money supported 57 projects over the next five years. Thirteen aimed to develop commercial services and three of these came to be seen as strategic flagship projects. Minitel set out to create a national videotex network. Gulliver was an online information and reservation system for Irish tourism. And PostGem introduced an EDI service that represented a move towards paperless trading.
STAR also assisted fourteen telecommunications service centres in small towns and rural areas. Vincent Murphy established the best known of these: the Information Technology Centre in Letterkenny. He was not only able to get backing for this concept from the principal and board of the Regional Technical College, but also won the support of local politicians from all parties – no mean feat.
At the start of 1988 the NBST merged with the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards (IIRS) and became Eolas (the Irish word for ‘knowledge’). Six years later Eolas was combined with the Irish industries division of the former IDA to create Forbairt (the Irish word for ‘development’) and to focus on support for indigenous Irish industry.
About two thirds of the 90 NBST staff left the organisation during 1988 when Eolas was established. Mel Healy departed in that year and set up the Videotel consortium to drive the Minitel project. I became manager of the group, which became known as the information technologies division. I started to rebuild the team and recruited some experienced people from the IIRS, including Ronan Breslin who had direct responsibility for STAR, Denis Toomey who later had direct responsibility for Telematique, Tom Sheedy and Rory Power, who became responsible for Esprit and EDIFACT. Tony McDonald and Michael Wilson from NBST remained in the new group. Tony, who had come from Telecom Eireann, was involved in a broad range of communications-related activities both national and international. All of us helped with various aspects of STAR and Telematique.
Brian O’Donnell pictured during the Telematique years (Photograph by Marie Kearns, reproduced with permission)
Eolas inherited the NBST’s responsibility for STAR’s service stimulation strand and was later appointed as the implementing agency in Ireland for the follow-on programme. Telematique did not provide any funding for infrastructure. It was designed to reinforce STAR’s work on advanced services and placed more emphasis on smaller firms as service providers and service users. The Commission allocated €11 million to Ireland. We held an open call for outline proposals in early 1991 and received a remarkable response – more than 400 proposals from 174 public and private sector organisations. These would have cost about 20 times the available funds.
There was now a huge buzz of excitement around online services. People were seeing business opportunities in information access and could seek 50 percent of the finance from Telematique. We proceeded to invite full proposals and agreed to support 79 projects, of which 48 were led by private companies. Some of the STAR projects would continue but there were also many new ones. Nine new businesses were created through Telematique.
Some of the Telematique projects were very pioneering, like a medical imaging network for Southern Health Board hospitals, the teleworking models promoted by Telecottages Ireland and Touchtel’s proposed network of public access terminals for information on travel, accommodation, entertainment and the arts. TouchTel subsequently installed a prominent pyramid-shaped structure to offer these types of information in the arrivals area of Dublin airport.
I always expected that most of the initiatives would be small and temporary. And the Commission envisaged that there would be a need for further programmes after 1994. Information services were still new. We were really just providing stimulation money.
Consider what happened to the three flagship projects in STAR. Minitel was dependent on videotex standards from France, where manufacturing companies wanted to create a worldwide market for their information terminals. Minitel was already an old technology and failed to take hold in other countries. Gulliver also began as a videotex service. It ran into difficulties, partly because the communications infrastructure in rural areas was not good enough for data access. PostGem attracted a few large customers instead of the large number of small organisations that it had hoped for. All these projects helped, nonetheless, to lay the building blocks for later services.
STAR and Telematique were directly relevant to the birth and growth of internet infrastructure and services in Ireland, even though the internet did not feature directly in their operations. It seemed to us that the internet was developing naturally, but was developing somewhere else. We never saw ourselves as its promoters. The term that we always used instead was ‘online services’.
This was the time when the European Commission favoured the OSI model and viewed the emergence of TCP/IP as a challenge to OSI. This issue came up quite a lot in meetings of the Esprit management committee. STAR and Telematique were less concerned with the development of platforms and protocols. Their projects used whatever was available – platforms that would have been superseded by something else with or without the internet.
Eolas introduced X.400 e-mail for its staff in the early 1990s. I don’t recall when the agency added internet e-mail. It just happened one day, giving us another service. I remember much more clearly when I started using EuroKom back in the NBST days. We saw it as important for Ireland that EuroKom’s facilities were based here. But I found its EuroContact service very frustrating. I recall slow response speeds and that the range of people I was able to communicate with was very limited.
Eolas went on to become Forbairt and Forbairt was succeeded by Enterprise Ireland. I stayed with the agency until I retired in 2004, working on Ireland’s involvement with the Framework research programmes, with the European Space Agency and other international organisations and national initiatives such the Programmes in Advanced Technology.
In retrospect the range of communications initiatives undertaken in the pre-broadband era, and the ambition they displayed, were remarkable. STAR was difficult but it enabled many people to take their first steps into online services. By the time that the programme finished, everyone wanted to get in on the action.
Last edit: April 2016
© Brian O’Donnell 2016