WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR US TO ACT ON PHONES?

53-year-old barred from Facebook after sexually exploiting girl France votes to back smartphone ban in its schools But Government insists our children are being protected

THE dangers our children face online were again laid bare yesterday when a man who admitted sexually exploiting a girl was banned from social media.

Adrian Finnerty, 53, had used the internet to encourage a girl to engage in a sexual act, in yet another case which

highlights the need to protect our children when using smartphones and social media.

However, in a victory for the campaign to safeguard young people online, politicians in France overwhelmingly backed plans for a ban on smartphones in schools for children up to the age of 16 amid fears of grooming and cyber-bullying.

At Galway Circuit Criminal Court yesterday, Finnerty of Athenry Road, Loughrea, was remanded on bail to reappear on November 8 for sentence. Judge Eoin Garavan re-imposed a strict ban on social media use that was first imposed at the District Court last August. In an unrelated case of online abuse, Dubliner Matthew Horan, 26, was convicted in January of grooming a string of primary school girls – six of them Irish – and making them perform sex acts online.

And former RTÉ producer Kieran Creaven, 55, was jailed for 18 months in March by a court in Leeds for grooming and trying to incite a child to engage in sexual activity.

Last month 52-year old Brian Manning of St Finbarr’s Close, Greenhills, Dublin, admitted possession of child abuse images he accessed via an instant messaging app on his phone.

Yesterday, the French Assembly voted to back plans for a ban on smartphones in schools. Politicians there fear that the devices have put children at risk of grooming and cyber-bullying while giving instant access to pornography.

They also fear phones are hampering the ability of youngsters to interact socially and improve their education.

An early stage of the Bill – first proposed in Emmanuel Macron’s presidential election manifesto last year – was backed by 312 MPs from the president’s ruling En Marche! party along with 47 Democratic Movement MPs.

This increases the likelihood that it will be in place when children return to school this September.

Fianna Fáil’s education spokesman Thomas Byrne welcomed the development in France and he said it demonstrates a smartphone ban in schools ‘can be done’, as his party has called for.

The Meath East TD said: ‘We think that Macron has it right in France and we think we should be doing the same here. There are sound reasons to do this. All the research shows that phones in schools lower academic achievement.’

Mr Byrne said: ‘Generally speaking, [school] principals tell me that national guidance on this issue would be very, very helpful.’

In recent weeks, Richard Bruton issued a circular to schools instructing that they must consult with pupils, staff and parents about their smartphone usage policies – something which Mr Byrne has described as a ‘wishy-washy’ move.

A spokeswoman for the Education Minister last night said the circular means ‘schools will be required to consult on the appropriate use, if any, of smartphones in schools’.

She added: ‘This bottom-up approach will ensure all parents, teachers and school communities are satisfied with the smartphone policy in place in their school.

‘It will also mean that parents will be able to adopt a complimentary approach at home to what they know is in place in their child’s school, if they wish to do so.’

There have been growing calls for age restrictions on smartphones in recent years.

On Monday, the Irish Daily Mail revealed how junior minister Jim Daly was so concerned about our children’s safety online that he wrote to Leo Varadkar to say it is ‘the single biggest threat to our nation’s children’.

The minister for mental health urged the Taoiseach to introduce measures that would force phone firms to block ‘the most vulgar or violent’ online content, which he said was being accessed by children as young as three.

‘Let Ireland be a leader on this issue and do the right thing by our children to stop the irreversible damage... being done to their mental health and general well-being on a daily basis,’ he said in a letter to the Taoiseach.

His warning came just weeks after the Government’s plan to set the digital age of consent at the lowest possible age of 13 was shot down by the Opposition. It will now be 16.

The Digital Age of Consent is the age that children are allowed to open an account with the likes of Facebook and Twitter without their parents’ permission. An Irish Daily Mail/Ireland Thinks poll revealed in January that more than two thirds of people support a smartphone ban for those aged under 16.

In February, some 92 principals across the country told this newspaper they backed the idea of an age restriction for smartphone ownership.

Patrick Martin, principal of St Mochta’s National School in Co. Louth, has warned that children as young as 11 can view pornography on their smartphones.

He said: ‘If you’re going to shy away from putting an age restriction on access to phones, it’s frightening to say it, but things like pornography will have to be discussed at primary school level.’

YESTERDAY, 53-year-old Adrian Finnerty pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a child by inviting her, in November 2016, to engage in sexual behaviour. While the precise details of the exploitation are not yet publicly available, the fact that Mr Finnerty has now been banned from using Facebook and all other forms of social media is a reminder that such vehicles were used in the grooming of the child in question.

Within this context, it is impossible not to call to mind the appalling Matthew Horan case, when the now-jailed Horan was found guilty at the beginning of this year of coercing and sexually exploiting two young children online. Children as young as nine years of age.

This latest incident, therefore, serves as yet another powerful and potent reminder that the internet, while clearly having many benefits for children, is also an extremely dangerous place for them to operate, especially when they do so in an unsupervised capacity, as was the case with Horan’s victims.

On top of the potential that the internet offers predators for the grooming and sexual exploitation of children, we must also consider the other negatives of the medium. Cyber bullying is one well recognised problem, as is the evidence that internet usage interferes with children’s sleep patterns, while also causing damage to their emotional wellbeing and self-esteem.

Furthermore, there is crystal-clear evidence that the use of smartphones in schools is damaging the academic performance of children. We need to look no further for evidence of this than to the definitive study carried out on this subject by the London School of Economics. What this study concluded was that permitting the use of smartphones in schools led to students’ exam marks dropping by an average of 6%.

Worse still, the effect was even more damaging to the most disadvantaged students. In their case, there was an average drop of 14% when those pupils were allowed to have smartphones in school.

All of this negative and conclusive evidence doesn’t even take into account, of course, the on-the-spot testimony of teachers who deal with this issue every day of their working lives – teachers who are constantly advocating against smartphone usage because they witness the myriad problems created by their presence in the classroom.

Therefore, in the light of all this overwhelming evidence, it is absolutely right that the French Assembly has now voted conclusively to support a ban on smartphones in French schools. And that that country’s education minister has spoken out, declaring that smartphones should not be permitted to monopolise our lives.

The French have acted. Now it’s up to this country to follow suit. Not by placing the onus on individual schools in some kind of ad hoc and ultimately unsatisfactory arrangement, but rather by the Government taking the lead and implementing a national ban in our schools.

Of course there will be reluctance in some Government quarters when it comes to the matter of a national policy, as may well also be the case within some of the teaching unions.

In this context, however, you would have to ask a simple question: when it is so abundantly clear that smartphones damage schoolchildren, why should any school in the country allow pupils to have them in their possession? What possible reason could there be for permitting any school to have a policy that has been proven to damage both the academic performance and the emotional wellbeing of our children?

The evidence is irrefutable. It’s time for our politicians to get off the fence on this issue. What we need now is action.