Take a couple of teenagers - one still at school - and a low-cost airline. The airline wants to take bookings online fast but it baulks at the rates and the timescale quoted by web designers. It gives the job to the teenagers and, within weeks, from a bedroom in Dublin's suburbia, they produce the front end of the new website.

Today, barely a year later, low-cost airline Ryanair is taking 65 per cent of its bookings throughout Europe on that website, giving it the highest online penetration of any European airline with the exception of EasyJet. The teenagers now have their own business and are members of a new Irish club - young, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial.

It doesn't seem to matter that technology shares have plummeted and that Ireland has its share of dotcom fall-out. The internet has infused Ireland's youth with an enthusiasm for a limitless new medium, while a robust economy has given them opportunities that their elder siblings would have thought impossible.

It would be easy to depict Ireland as a successful, inclusive society that is embracing technological change. That conclusion is true if the analysis goes no further than the young, the well-educated and the increasingly affluent. Scratch the surface, though, and a divide is exposed in both awareness and access between young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural.

Statistically, Ireland is playing catch-up with the rest of Europe. Internet access from home has now passed the psychological 1m barrier, which seems respectable given the country's population of just 3.8m. However, according to Nielsen Net Ratings Global Trends, the number of households with internet access in Ireland is just 22.7 per cent, which is about half that of Europe's leader, Sweden. On a world league table, however, as measured by the IDC/World Times Information Society Index, Ireland has moved from 23rd to 19th position in just four years.

The story of Ireland's economic turnaround has been well told. With growth rates at the top of the European pile, the country is moving closer to full employment every day. Two-thirds of young people leaving university have either business or technical qualifications and myriad career choices. As recently as the late 1980s, their older siblings were leaving Ireland in their thousands in search of work - any kind of work - in the UK, the US or beyond.

Today, Ireland can't find enough skilled people for its high-tech sector. Ironically, over the course of a decade, the country has switched from being an exporter of knowledge workers to being an importer. East Europeans, Americans, Australians and other nationalities have filled the vacancies.Ireland, as the US's number one choice for overseas investment in Europe, is home to a who's who of leading technology companies - Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Dell and Apple. Analysts usually focus on Ireland's benign tax climate when examining the reasons behind this influx of foreign investment. However, its population profile - 55 per cent of the population is under the age of 34 - and its skills base are of equal importance.

An enlightened educational regime means that graduates are in huge demand. Some even command signing-on fees for the privilege of accepting a new job.Enterprise culture4That flurry of inward investment has spawned a thriving domestic software sector and an enterprise culture that would have seemed improbable 20 years ago. It has produced a generation at ease with technological change, one which their parents regard with both awe and envy.

The pattern that emerges about internet access is no different to that for the Irish economy as a whole. The issue is disparity. Online adopters are ABC1s (high-earning households), although they account for just over a third of the population. Fewer than half of manual workers are familiar with PCs. Early adopters also tend to be urban: huge tracts of rural Ireland have been untouched by the economic boom and survive on declining agricultural incomes.

High-tech industries are clustered around large population centres which have benefited from investment in infrastructure. It could take up to five years for all of rural Ireland to benefit from the government's broadband investment programme.

The government's Information Society Commission has put inclusiveness on the agenda. Initiatives range from bringing small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) online to telecom deregulation to enhancing PC penetration in schools.

Although the high-tech sector has taken a pounding, anticipated growth rates in the industry mean there is plenty of capacity to absorb job losses. Ireland's most spectacular dotcom disaster was an e-commerce solutions company called Ebeon, which folded in January.

The shareholder who pulled the plug is Eircom, the former telecom monopolist, in which over half a million Irish people own shares. Ireland's economic growth and share of US investment in Europe are slowing, but few experts are predicting catastrophe.

From Ebeon's embers, for example, new business opportunities are emerging and head-hunters have swarmed to secure the best talent.

* Aileen O'Toole, a co-founder and former deputy editor of The Sunday Business Post newspaper, is now a content consultant