From her first floor office, across from MacCarthy's shoe store on O'Connell Street, Ms Triona McInerney can monitor her town's upward mobility. Ennis is buzzing these days; construction under way at every turn, the narrow pavements more packed than ever with people.

But now, those people are getting restless. Autumn, with its spectacular hurling victories, and the wresting of the Information Age Town from 45 contenders, seems like a dream.

"Total anticlimax," says one shopper. "The whole Information Age thing has died down. Apart from someone I know getting his phone put in for free, there's nothing happening."

Others complain that there is no sign of the "free computers" they read about in some - erroneous - reports. In fact, there's no sign of anything. There is, however, a plan. And Mr T.J. Waters, the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, who along with Ms McInerney its development officer worked long hours on the Ennis bid, is keeping the faith.

"This is a huge project, and it's important to get it right, especially the structure, from day one," she says. "But we're very anxious to get it up and running; we want to keep the enthusiasm going."

Next week, Telecom Eireann will appoint a project manager. The holder of the post will also integrate the Ennis developments with the other three finalist towns, Castlebar, Killarney and Kilkenny, as well as the Information Age Schools project.

Behind the scenes, Ms McInerney says, Telecom has targeted several "early hits", high visibility projects that will kick in over the weeks before Christmas.

This week, a team of technical auditors visited all of the town's eight schools, assessing how they could best use computers.

"Their brief is to put in place a project way ahead of anything, anywhere else in the world," says Mr Gerry O'Sullivan, head of corporate communications at Telecom.

The University of Limerick will train the town's teachers in how to integrate information technology with their curricula, providing ongoing support by video-conference. During the Christmas break, the engineers will move into each school, wiring it with top-grade computers and hooking it by a high-speed ISDN connection to the Internet.

Ennis public library will soon be equipped with a bank of state-ofthe-art computers, also connected by ISDN lines to the Internet.

"We're not going to do anything in Ennis that isn't ahead of current best practice - because obviously you can look now at best practice, and we want to learn something new," says Mr O'Sullivan.

Initial surveys of the town showed that 17 per cent of households did not have a telephone. All of these have been offered free connections; many are already using their new phones, and Telecom expects virtually every household to have a phone by Christmas. Every telephone subscriber will be given voicemail.

Engineers have now begun work on a fibre-optic cable ring around the town which is essential for the transmission of high-speed data.

Mr O'Sullivan says Telecom has chosen the site for the information age centre, which will act as a community access and training facility and a showcase for visitors to the town. Work on the building - currently owned by Telecom - will start soon and should be completed early in the new year.

With the Telecom and the Ennis Task Force about to choose key personnel to manage and plan the project on the ground, Ms McInerney says her office in the Chamber of Commerce has been deluged with business offers from outside the town.

"But we're an open shop here - we're saying: `Send us your ideas, and we'll consider them'. We want submissions from businesses and from technology producers," she says.

"We have also been inundated with e-mails from people all over the world who want to take sabbaticals from their jobs and come to Ennis for the information age town project," Ms McInerney adds. "We have hundreds of students who want to do their final year thesis, even doctorates, on it."

She believes that the key to Ennis people getting the most out of the investment, and ultimately to the success of the project for Telecom, is training.

"Training is crucial. The reality is that there's no point in giving out computers to people just so they can play computer games," she says.

Telecom stressed again this week that it will not be giving computers out for free, but will charge local people a small fraction of the cost. The company has said it is determined that no one should be left out of the project because they cannot afford this fee, and that low-income families will be given interest-free loans if they require them.

On O'Connell Street, Ms Triona McInerney radiates confidence in a bright future for the town: "By next month we'll have our map, and we will follow it to the future."