Vodafone Ireland is making much of its 25th anniversary or, as it puts it, how it has been “connecting you to what matters most for 25 years”. There are also, however, 25 ways for a sceptic to consider what mobile phone use has resulted in over the past quarter-century.

They have made us less connected. Who needs to talk to anyone when you can constantly scroll alone? Mobile phones feed social media addiction, powerfully underlined in Róisín Kiberd’s book The Disconnect (2021). Kiberd, born in 1989, recalls how “texting was itself a kind of preteen performance of independence … this was my first taste of immersion in a tiny screen, a way to disappear in plain sight”.

In 2024, the Irish Medical Organisation called for a ban on mobile use by those younger than 16, saying smartphones and the social media content accessible on them were “overwhelmingly destructive to children”.

Many children do not seem to know how to answer their mobile phones because they do not see that as being the purpose of the phone.

As reported in The Guardian in 2008, two children in Spain were treated for mobile phone addiction in a mental health clinic. A child psychiatrist suggested they might need a year of treatment to get them off this “drug”. Both........

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