Ms Karen Murphy:

We in Carnew are fortunate in that we have a counsellor on-site a couple of days a week. She is amazing, fantastic and a wonderful support to our students. To go back to the first issue on bullying and social media, one thing I took from this project is that for the majority of young people, their entire lives revolve around social media. We very rarely hear a conversation that does not start with, "Did you see that online?" or "She said that online". Every conversation they have revolves around online media. When something negative about them is put online, because their world is social media, their world crumbles down. They do not have the sense of how transient and short-lived things are online that it will blow over in two or three days. When you are in your world and something bad has been said about you online or a picture or post or whatever it is that has caused someone to go to that dark place, it seems like their entire world has turned against them. The fact that it will blow over in two or three days and there will be another bikini thing or something to talk about down the line, the young people do not understand that. Counselling would be of massive assistance to them.