I applaud this initiative and welcome the proposal to place computers at the disposal of primary schools. Is the Taoiseach aware that when the leader of my party, Deputy Harney, made this recommendation at our national conference in Limerick last November, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Quinn, wrote to her the following day accusing her of financial recklessness by proposing to provide computers in every school? What has happened in the meantime to make the Government change its mind?

A general election.

We are six months closer to an election.

Are the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance ad idem on this issue?

He will put them down manholes in future.

Is that where the Deputy will be hiding? He will be canvassing down there — a political underworld.

There is a computer in 65 per cent of primary schools and in virtually all secondary schools. The difficulty is that there are not a sufficient number of them to cater for the number of pupils who want to use them. For example, in primary schools there is approximately one computer for every 100 pupils while in secondary schools there is one for every 33. Our aim should be to provide one computer for every ten pupils in primary schools and one for every three in post primary schools. Considerable leeway must be made up. It is very important that the computers provided should be capable of being linked to the internet and are not just confined to the use of information available on disk in these schools.

Emphasis should be placed on training teachers and that is the most important element of this initiative. The experience of introducing computers in other walks of life is that frequently they were not used adequately, or at all in some instances, because people did not fully understand what they were capable of doing.

When did the Taoiseach have a change of heart?

The training of teachers will be a major element in this. Fourteen thousand teachers will be trained shortly to develop this initiative.