An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-07
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Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

Stolen Focus is a book that was published in 2022. It was written by a journalist, Johann Hari. This book should be recommended reading for all teachers, parents and legislators in this State. It addresses an issue that is of critical importance to our young people. As the title would suggest, Stolen Focus revolves around the whole question of attention spans and ability to concentrate. Those are features that are being fragmented in the young people as a result of the huge investment of their time in smart phones and modern digital technology.
The thesis of Johann Hari is that your attention and attention span have not collapsed but have been systematically designed to break up in the face of this digital technology. He suggests that the reform of this technology needs to eliminate survey-based advertising. Platforms should be encouraged to optimise well-being and not engagement, and to reduce the use of compulsive scrolling or infinite scroll, as it is called.
It is interesting that one of the first states to advocate technology in the classroom was Sweden and now, ten or 15 years later, the whole emphasis in Sweden is going back to long forms of learning, long reading, copybooks and notebooks in the classroom, and minimising the amount of technology. That says something about the trends that it has recognised.
This morning in The Irish Times , there was an article with the by-line "Secret Teacher". Nobody has fessed up to being the author. It was an extremely good article because it outlined the systematic demoralisation of the teaching force as it encountered the difficulties of broken focus and concentration in classrooms. The article also went on to talk abut the propensity for routine engagement with parents who tend to adopt the standpoint of the pupil or student who is being disciplined, or whom attempts are made to discipline and they further exacerbate the problem. That, of course, ends up with the demoralisation of the teaching force because a lot of teachers are wondering at this stage why they should bother.
It is easier to cave in, in the face of this whole principle and the parental tsunami of disapproval that comes at them. In regard to the status of this problem for our young people and our education system, we in the Upper House should give over a long debate to the use of technology in schools and classrooms. We should ask our Minister for education to come in and give decent time to it so that we could have a round and comprehensive debate on what is becoming commonplace for debate in other democracies, namely, on the decimation of the schooling system by smart technology.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-07