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THE TECHNOLOGY GIANT Google is offering free web classes and free lunches to people over 50 in the Ringsend and Irishtown areas of Dublin where it is based as part of a programme to make more older people computer literate.
Google Ireland, which employs over 2,200 people in the country, has been offering free tuition in using computers and the internet at its headquarters in the Docklands area to local residents and hopes to rollout a similar service across the country next year.
Engineers from the company have been inviting older people into its Barrow Street headquarters for a tour of the building, one-to-one internet tuition and a free lunch, the Irish Daily Mail reported today.
“A big problem in Ireland is the particularly low internet usage rates among OAPs or not very advanced usage so people aren’t really getting the benefit out of the internet,” Sinead Gibney, Head of Social Action at Google Ireland, told TheJournal.ie.
The Age Engage programme has so far seen around 400 people mostly from the Ringsend and Irishtown areas receive over 1700 hours of training in total with a fifth of Google Ireland staff taking part in the delivery of one-to-one training.
Google says that 14 of the people they have trained have been through a Train the Trainer course which upon completion allows the person to go out and teach other people in their peer group either under supervision or by themselves.
“We may try to do it in a rural communities, the model would be quite different there,” Gibney added pointing to the fact that Google does not operate in every community which much of the current programme dependent on staff at the tech company volunteering for it.
Gibney added that there were plenty more people who Google wanted to reach with its programme and that part of the on the streets recruitment operation also involved collecting data.
“We’re gathering data to understand the barriers, to understand from those who come in and those who don’t what are the barriers there.
“These figures correalate to larger national studies and we hope from this to provide soluitions to help people up skill,” she added.
Google Ireland is also working in partnership with Age Action in a bid to identify the Silver Surfer, a person over the age of 50, who embraces the Internet or technology with a sense of fun and adventure.
The awards which celebrate “older people and technology” are still accepting nominations until 14 September.
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Comments closed on everything today bar the most mundane.
@Daniel O’Neill: Oh,for peat’s sake
@Daniel O’Neill: they’ll probably delete this too
@Daniel O’Neill: And even when you do comment it will only allow the most vanilla of replies for fear of offending someone. The journal is all about its clicks but if this horse manure continues the people won’t comment for much longer and will just drift away from the site altogether.
@Gerry from the Block: nah.. It’s been like this for years.. People drift in and out but it always has some base.. Just a slow revolving door
Didn’t read the article, but as long as we harvest peat we are only kidding ourselves about sorting climate change.
@DERRY1973: climate change is the new stealth tax that keeps talking and at this stage is it is going to take the citizens of Ireland to the cleaners to no avail because the it’s population of the world is the problem and taxes don’t make any difference except to those in middle income because the are subsidised to have children and stay at home for a hand living
Keep it in the ground, both in and out of Ireland.
@Peadar Ó Rathaille: that’s how I’ll be voting at the next elections.
Absolutely zero joined up thinking here on Planet Ireland. Can’t burn the peat here, but can import it and also vast quantities of wood biomass from some cut out rainforest.
Growing medium is something cyclically harvested out of integrated constructed wetland systems, on every suitable small stream and river, primarily for the sequestration of carbon, phosphate, and nitrates, before all our waterways and near inshore zones are ruined by eutrophication. This is where the farming subsidies should be going.
The mega one for the central bogs though, is a couple of SMRs into each of the old peat power stations. Then the data centres. Then the waste heat of both to a massive complex of hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, all pesticide free. Then the fly factories, their larvae eating a large part of our one million tonnes of food waste a year, before being fed to the salmon and chicken, with the rest of the bog area re engineered for sequestration.
Remember though we are dealing with Bord na Mona whose understanding of climate action was to stop using peat, but instead import wood biomass from Queensland.
@Nicholas Grubb: you would think the green party would be all over this sort of achievable biodiversity.
Apparently not.
Should the mushroom industry not have been researching alternatives before now as the cessation of peat harvesting has been widely flagged for years now? It can’t have come as a surprise.
Lorry loads of milled peat been sent to ports in Belfast to go to the rest of the UK is just wrong and a shame to see. It should be banned and strictly enforced
Since when were local council planners, an bord pleanala, and the EPA, competent judges / authorities / consultants?
@Archie Lochus: since never!!
I didn’t read the article so I don’t know if it said that a lot of the peat we export goes to the UK and then we buy the exact same peat back. Utter nonsense
An informative article but gets a bit bogged down in detail at times…
The production of the food that we eat, the food that sustains us, is being impeded, disparaged, and heckled at every level by the ultra-green lobby, who appear to think that they should be in complete control of what we eat and how it’s produced. Would absolute dictatorship be a realistic description of this mindset?
Irish peat for the Irish people
There was me wondering why we’re importing peat at all since we export the stuff. Then I had a look at the table: Northern Ireland peat would be considered an import. Fair enough. Second on the list: the Netherlands. Further away than Great Britain. “Peat it says here on the import papers. Nothin to see here. Let her through”.
Exporting bog
have your say