Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 22 June 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children and Youth Affairs

Children's Experiences during COVID-19 Restrictions and Lockdowns: Engagement

Mr. Conor James:

For me, before that I used to be out for perhaps one, two or three hours a day, and that is not including walking to school or being in school.

I used to play quite a bit. In lockdown, I used to go online at between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., or 9 a.m. to 9.30 a.m., if it was not as big of a day. After doing that and finishing my schoolwork, it would be lunch by the time I had done everything. Sometimes, I was online for a long time and it was really hard, but then other times, I was online for a shorter time. Afterwards, I did not get back to the structure of a normal day quite fast. Half the time I found that by 4 or 5 o’clock, when school was meant to be over, if I had some difficult homework or something to do like a project, I would try to finish it all in a day. If I was done by noon and I did not have anything to do, I would just sit around. Sometimes, I would play the iPad, watch TV or go outside. Then I had to go back to school where if I finished something, I just had to read. I could not zoom forward and finish all my work in a day. It was hard to come back to normality and the schedule.