Albert Dolan (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It would be remiss of me not to tell the Minister of State the story of my generation. When we started in secondary school in 2011, all of our phones were still call and text phones. By the time we reached the junior certificate year, every single person had a smartphone, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. The entire landscape of being a teenager in Ireland had completely changed by 2013. Since then, what we have seen has been an escalation and elevation of the speed at which mobile phones and the applications therein seek to take our attention and time and, ultimately, rob us of the ability to form real life connections with people in school, on the pitch, going out and living life as a normal teenager would have done for many years. No doubt, technology has provided a huge amount of information, access and ability for people but, to be honest, all I see at the moment is distraction.

Recently, I attended an event in Labane in County Galway that was run by a lady called Aoife Noone. She runs Think Smart Cyber and is travelling around County Galway holding events for parents. Recently, in Loughrea, there was a packed room at her event and there were packed rooms in Labane and Dunmore. She is selling out rooms to parents because they simply do not know what the answer is or how to get their children away from the phones.

What do most parents want? First and foremost, they want their children to be safe. They then want their children to achieve the very best of their potential. Look at the way China rolls out TikTok to its young people. It only shows them information that will benefit them. However, we only see information that is distracting, pulls us away from our goals and distracts us with the lives of others.

The Government needs to make a very clear decision about which way we will go here. First and foremost, we have to protect people. We have to ensure we leave no child behind and go back to our community roots. We do that by enforcing rules on these companies which seek nothing more than profit.

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