Ms Karen Murphy:

The goal is to get information to the relevant people early. Telling people aged 13, 14 or 15 years that they are fake is too late. In one's head, one has already decided at that stage that one is fat, one is ugly, one has bad hair or one has bad whatever. In addition, as Annie mentioned, for me on a personal level the thing with people having babies and appearing five minutes later on social media in a bikini is truly detrimental. There is the incidence of post-natal depression, especially in isolation during Covid-19, and then seeing an image of somebody like that online. Even though one knows it is fake and that the person has a personal chef and has taken 27,000 shots in order to get that one shot, the rational part of one's brain is put to the side and that other part just comes to the fore. One partly believes it and one still feels negative about oneself.

Our goal from the start has been education and to get to young people early. In one of the schools we visited, Clonegal National School, my son was in the class. He had heard me, not that he ever listens to me, talk about this project since we started. However, it was only when Darragh, Annie and the rest of the class came in and showed them that they listened. They listened to young people; they did not listen to me. I tell them all the time that something is fake, but they listen to the young people.