Picture a truckload of cyber-engineers, tooled up with equipment so high-tech that some of their colleagues don't really understand how it functions. When they reach a certain town, they will leap from their vehicle and get to work.

This is about to happen to Ennis, Co Clare, and the local people are delighted at the prospect. Most of its 17,000 residents became involved in the campaign to win Tele com Eireann's Information Age Town award, volunteering to become digital pioneers and to receive £15 million worth of electronic gadgetry and training.

Their lives will change, they believe, for the better. Ennis will have a jump on the rest of the country, applying cutting-edge technology in everyday lives and reporting back.

About four in every five homes will get a new multi-media computer; so will businesses, big and small. Schools, in particular, will be targeted. Each educational facility will see dozens of PCs installed; every child from the age of five will get intensive training in the use of computers.

Public services - the county council offices, hospitals, libraries, the Garda station - will also be wired. Replacing the banknotes and coins which once changed hands so rapidly in its market square will be smart cards. With most local traders kitted out with machines to debit the cards, the project aims to create a cashless society.

Linking all of these computers together will be an intranet - a localised version of the Internet. This local network will be the beating heart of the experiment.

Most people, organisations and businesses will be connected to this intranet, some 24 hours a day. Telecom envisages that the multiplicity of contacts generated by this network will in time create a deep sense of community.

Installing thousands of computers and ISDN lines is equivalent only to building the foundations of a skyscraper. Only after the gear has been installed does the real work begin - teaching people how to use it. Aside from intensive sessions for students, most of the general population will need continuous training if they are to take proper advantage of their new digital power.

The project will also have to maintain and build upon the current level of public enthusiasm, sustaining itself beyond the initial novelty period and through the difficulties many will have coping with the technology.

Almost as important will be the commitment of the business and services sector. For commerce to switch online, as is planned, it must reach a critical mass of use. To attain this, Telecom will have to convince most of the town's traders of the advantages of a new, electronic approach to their work.

Librarians, county council officials, hospital administrators and gardai are also key participants in the project. They too will need consultants to assess the best ways of computerising many of their daily dealings with the public.

"We intend to blanket it [Ennis] with all the communications tools of the information age to see what happens when an entire community becomes wired," Telecom's chief executive, Alfie Kane, told the announcement ceremony at Dublin's Point Theatre on Wednesday night.

The idea to transform a town into a living show case, and indeed a guinea pig, for the future, was Mr Kane's. From a corporate point of view, it was a win-win proposition.

The contest has already generated enormous goodwill for Telecom Eireann and received much front-page and prime-time news coverage, all of it positive. This alone would make the project commercially worthwhile, coming as it does in the run-up to a new era of telephone competition.

As well as continuing news coverage of the project, hundreds of thousands of people will visit the town and, Telecom hopes, be encouraged to use its products and services when they get back to their own homes and businesses.

The company will also garner a vast amount of valuable information over the five to 10 years which the project is likely to last.

The people of Ennis will find themselves under the microscope. There will be intense scrutiny by Telecom of how they use the technology - one of the main purposes of the investment is to gather information about how future customers will behave.

From the speed at which different categories of customers pick up how to surf the net to what daily task they resist switching online, their movements will be tracked by market researchers.

This is one of the main reasons the computers and other equipment designated for the town will not be free, but heavily subsidised. Telecom says that while the objective is to make the technology available to all, to give everything out for free could introduce elements which would skew the research.

At the ceremony in the Point, however, company executives were quick to stress they would ensure that poorer families were not priced out of the project.

Behind the market researchers will be more professionals in white coats, this time from Dublin City University. These academics will study the socio-economic aspects of the experiment, probing the different ways in which men and women, old and young, rich and poor react and adapt to the new technology.

If Ennis can cope with the shock of the new, and whatever intrusiveness the project entails, the experiment should be a happy one for its people. As Mr Kane has pointed out, it will not be long before information-based jobs represent a quarter of all employment.

"Ireland could, if we play our cards rights, get a disproportionate amount of this global 25 per cent," he said this week.

Long before Ennis was drawn from the envelope, the canny president of its Chamber of Commerce, Mr T.J. Waters, had lined up close to 200 high-tech jobs, conditional upon victory. More are expected to follow, centring initially on a parcel of land in the town earmarked for digital-age factories and design studios.

What everyone hopes, too, is that local people will start their own information-based enterprises, for example providing content for the Internet. This could initiate a lasting economic boom for the town, ensuring that the days when so many of its young people left to find work were over.

"Our third all-Ireland victory in 10 days - how much more can we take?" exclaimed Mr Waters when he heard Ennis was the chosen town. However, should local people at any stage feel that their feet are no longer firmly on the ground, they will heed a silent warning from the statue in the main square.

It is of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and paid the price.