William J Martin and Sean F McKeown
Rural areas throughout Europe are facing extreme pressures of decline, unemployment, poverty, and peripherality. The European Community (EC) has embarked on a series of measures to combat these phenomena, notably through programs such as STAR and Telematique, which involve the promotion and use of advanced telecommunications infrastructure, and ORA, which aims specifically at the development of telematics in rural areas. The experience of such programs in Northern Ireland is used to assess the relevance of information and telecommunications technologies for rural areas in general. Examples are given of the application of these technologies in other parts of Europe, particularly with the development of teleworking. The most obvious conclusion is that neither EC intervention nor the application of information and telecommunications technologies is sufficient to address the problems of rural areas, without adherence to the principles of integrated rural development.