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In the traditional Catholic communities of Dublin, the financial decisions of loving fathers used to be more limited in scope: “it was about getting kids shoes for their confirmations, and getting food from the cheapest shops,” remembers John Hogg. These days, things are changing. Even in the inner city, the most disadvantaged schools have begun to modernize their curriculum and offer ICT courses at the elementary school level. As a result, families prioritize differently. Thinking back a few years, John laughs: “the last thing on the father’s mind was getting the kid a computer.”
Times have changed in the neighborhoods of Ireland, and the changes are part of a major economic transformation underway nationwide. For those in the inner city, an opportunity today is seen to break the cycles of manual labor passed down from generation to generation. One place that the break is occurring is in computer training classrooms across Dublin.
John Hogg is a community development worker, and the manager of a City Council-funded community center in central Dublin. John recalls how low-skilled jobs and the wages they bring had become entrenched as family traditions. “Their kids were becoming laborers, but now they don’t have to.”
At his community center, John walks past a table full of sports trophies — one award belongs to the local winners of a Street League soccer tournament, a program for street kids. In the community center one room has a ping pong table, the other is full of computers. The computer skills lab is part of a city-wide program in Dublin run through a partnership between the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and a non-profit organization called the Digital Community. These programs first brought access to ICT training to every kid in the poorest areas in Dublin through a program that blanketed the neediest schools. Then they took the e-skills one step further: to the parents of these children through community centers like John’s.
Plugging-in for a new education
When the DIT-Digital Community partnership began a few years ago, it was a humble effort to recycle some redundant staff computers from the Institute of Technology. DIT decided to provide the computers to twenty “Disadvantaged Status Schools” — inner city primary and secondary schools in the most downtrodden and crime-ridden areas of Dublin. As this program took off, it grew to include all 42 Disadvantaged Status Schools, extending an opportunity for e-skills development to the neediest children in the city.
As the school programs became more solidified, they were supplemented by a handful of community technology centers placed in the common areas of public housing projects across Dublin. Created and staffed by the Digital Community project, the aim of the telecenters was to boost the self-esteem of the local communities, while also providing much-needed skills for participants to succeed in the 21st Century. These initial community telecenters have grown into 23 across Dublin,