Mr. Ian Power:

The point on social media is important because they are here to stay and we need to get to grips with the issue. I liken it to healthy eating. We all know that we should eat healthily, but very few of us make all of our own meals and stick to a strict diet. It is similar with mobile phones in the use of apps and various other things. We all know that they are not necessarily good for our mental health, but we are still compelled to use them. There is an addiction which is not dissimilar to eating junk food, consuming soft drinks and that type of thing. There is marketing at play on platforms, similar to how there is marketing at play when it comes to junk food companies. Ultimately, we need to learn how to control our impulses, as we do in the case of healthy eating. Just as we need to make it easier to eat healthily by reducing cost and such like, we need to make switching off and unplugging easier.

One thing we would recommend to young people is, for example, given that many apps automatically have notifications switched on in order to pull the user back in when they might be idle, that they should switch off notifications so they only dip in and out whenever they want to, as opposed to the app trying to wrestle their attention and control them. There are various things like that. If a person knows they are going out for a walk on the beach, there is no real reason to bring a phone. There is a benefit to unplugging and having an experience with other people, such as knowing to put phones in the centre of a table when with friends, so people are not all mindlessly checking instead of being present with each other. There are lots of things we can do. We can blame social media companies, and I think they should be held to account for lots of things they could do but, ultimately, we have an ability to control ourselves. We need to support young people to find the ways to do that, which is very important.

On the point on bullying, a lot of young people experience bullying in schools and this is obviously creeping into their home lives as well. Of all of the interventions we have seen, and we have been very active in this space, it is vital to have a whole-school approach whereby sixth year students - or sixth class students in primary school - are built up to be the people who set the tone and say that bullying is not acceptable in a school and that trickles all the way down through the years. What we find is that, once we give young people responsibility and a standard to which they should be held, they rise to that challenge and they support and educate the younger children to make sure it is socially unacceptable within that school community. We have seen this in particular in Drimnagh Castle school, which has had huge success in implementing that type of model. This needs to be replicated everywhere. Schools used to have an issue in admitting they might have a bullying problem because it used to be seen as an issue, whereas schools are now being much more honest and open about it, which is very good.