Greystones, Ireland: 12-year-old Bodie Mangan Gisler says a smartphone can be quite useful. First of all, he collects coins, and if he wants to know how much a particular coin is worth or what metals it contains, he can look up his mother’s phone and get the answer.
Most 12-year-olds would want a phone of their own. Not the Body. “I want to live long and stay healthy,” he said on a recent afternoon in his school’s library. But he worries that having a smart device could interfere with that. “Maybe I’ll say to my mom, ‘Can I download this game?’ And she’ll say, ‘Yes.’ And I will be absorbed.”
His friend Charlie Hess, a fellow coin collector, nods in agreement. He wants to get a smartphone when he is 15 or 16. Until then, he says, “I think I have better things to do.”
Kids are a little different here at Greystones. In 2023, the Irish coastal city south of Dublin launched a grassroots initiative led by local parents, school principals and community members to release control of technology to their youngest children by adopting a voluntary “no smart device” code and supporting it with workshops and social events.
Three years later, no one at Greystones claims to have cured the ills of modern technology. But they have learned that they can’t do anything about it one child at a time. Only a city-wide effort can counter the kids’ “everyone else has one” argument.
“With social media, it’s a collective thing,” said Jennifer Whitmore, a member of the Irish parliament and a mother of four from Greystones. “Treating it in an aggregated way is the way to go.”
The movement, called “It Takes a Village,” has since grown beyond this small town of 22,000. In a country that is home to the European headquarters of tech companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and LinkedIn, and where the average first-born child gets a smartphone around age 9 (younger siblings tend to get them earlier), the effort has struck a chord with everyone from local retailers to national politicians.
“It was one of the first countries to take collective action,” said Daisy Greenwell, who co-founded Britain’s smartphone-free childhood movement later that year — partly inspired by Greystones. “It made me think we can shift the culture here, too.”
Before holding his current position as Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Harris, a Greystones father, helped launch the project. “I believe we are effectively experimenting with the mental health and well-being of our youth with social media,” Harris said in a recent Instagram post. “And it simply cannot be allowed to continue.”
The aim is to give children time to ease into the digital future rather than drowning in it, said Rachel Harper, headteacher of St Patrick’s National School, which is leading the initiative. “This is the world that children are growing up in and we need to equip them,” she said.
“It Takes a Village” was conceived as students returned to school following the COVID-19 lockdowns. Harper was struck by how many tears she was seeing at the school gates. She heard similar reports from other elementary school principals, teachers and parents: children who struggle to sleep, refuse to come to school, download calorie-counting apps or are too distracted by texts sent the night before to focus in class.
“If we don’t take a stand now,” she said, “in five years would they be getting phones at 5 or 6?”
Eoghan Cleary, a teacher and assistant headteacher at Greystones’ Temple Carrig High School, had also raised the alarm. ‘I’d like to see no more beheadings’ – that’s what my students tell me the most,” he said. “‘I don’t want to see people being killed. ‘I don’t want to see people raped on the internet’.”
After nearly 800 parents responded to a survey sent out by elementary schools — more than half said their children were anxious and many had sought mental health help — the city decided it was time to act.
“I think it was so obvious that the phones were causing damage,” said resident Ross McParland, who first heard about the schools’ concerns over dinner at Harper’s home. McParland, a retired real estate consultant, addressed the Greystones Town team. Usually responsible for things like Christmas decorations and the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the city team’s volunteers quickly focused on the anti-anxiety project.
To launch the project, McParland hosted a town hall at the Whale Theatre, which he owned. Harris spoke, as did Stephen Donnelly, then the Irish health minister and another Greystones father. Two weeks later, all eight primary school principals signed a letter to parents in support of a voluntary code being implemented by the PTA. Parents can agree not to buy their children a smart device before high school, which most children start around age 12.
Seventy percent of parents signed up and the community rallied behind the cause.
The founder of a local film festival handled communications. Garrett Harte, a former editor-in-chief of Newstalk, Ireland’s nationwide radio station, helped refine the initiative’s message and delivery. “That was very, ‘our town needs a little help navigating this new world that adults have no idea about,'” Harte said.
Within months, Donnelly had set up a National Online Health Task Force, while Ireland’s Department of Education issued guidelines for other primary school communities wishing to follow Greystones’ model.
With its tradition of volunteerism and charity work, the close-knit city was well positioned for this kind of social experiment. There is a vibrant youth sports scene and young people can socialize face-to-face at the Youth Café, an after-school hangout. On Church Road, the old-fashioned high street, most of the shops are run by locals like Paddy Holohan, who recently sent a note to schools saying that children who need help – say, finding a parent – can always come to his SuperValu grocery store.
“It was just safety for the parents as the evenings were getting dark,” said Holohan, a Greystones father whose children were also not allowed smartphones at the primary school. “Everything doesn’t have to be online.”
These days, Greystones parents still face the familiar trickle of technology being handed out to kids who know how to shift their birth date by a few years to avoid age restrictions. According to a 2025 study by CyberSafeKids, an online safety group, 28% of Irish children between the ages of 8 and 12 experienced unsolicited content or contact that “disturbed” them, including exposure to horror, violence, sexual material and threats; 63% of primary school aged children said their parents could not see what they were doing online.
But with workshops for adults and children, podcasts on the topic (like one hosted by local twins Stephen and David Flynn, Greystones dads and lifestyle influencers) and events like a phone-free beach party, Greystones has seen a change: Parents say the pressure to get their kids a smartphone before they finish elementary school has all but disappeared. Some say they feel less alone navigating new technological lands. In St. Patrick’s, a teacher said her students were more alert in the morning.
Harper said the kids are making plans on their own, playing outside more and “just being kids.”
Interest is growing. Cleary, the assistant principal, hosts weekly parent talks, often in communities that want to follow in Greystones’ footsteps. On a recent rainy night at a Dublin primary school, the audience of about 100 groaned as he described how violent pornography had shaped his teenage students’ ideas about sexuality and how some technology companies were telling soon-to-be 13-year-olds how to bypass parental controls. (“Oh Jesus!” said one father).
Speaking from a decade of experience, Cleary urged parents to set limits on screen time and lobby elected officials for stronger technology legislation. Instead of imposing bans, he hopes these technologies will become safer for children.
“What Greystones has done is show that parents and communities are not powerless,” said Cleary, who took a sabbatical last year to conduct research with the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute of Ireland. “It is temporary and imperfect, a barrier to buy time.”
Basic moves are just the beginning, many agree. “Enforcing internet safety legislation to hold platforms to account will play an important role,” said Niamh Hodnett, Ireland’s Internet Safety Commissioner.
For now, though, parents and teachers at Greystones are struggling.
Nina Carberry, an Irish member of the European Parliament, said she was particularly impressed with a recent ‘It Takes a Village’ project, in which 16-year-olds from Temple Carrig ran mentoring workshops with young pupils at two local primary schools. In an email, Carberry said she intends to promote similar models at the European Union level.
Lauren Harnett, 13, attended a workshop last year. She found conversations with older children more informative than those with adults and less stressful. “They said, ‘If you use it the right way and if you’re open with your parents, you’ll be fine,'” she said.
This year, her first in high school, Lauren got her first smartphone. “When everyone around you has one, you want one,” she said. “I probably could have waited longer.”
