View from abroad: Phone pouches in schools will help students to focus

Ireland is going to use €9m pouches to keep teens off their phones. Do other countries do the same? What do they do in Spain?

There was anger, kickback, and outrage that so much money was going to be used in an effort to 'make post-primary schools smartphone free' by spending €9m on phone pouches. File photo: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

This year was a weird one in Irish politics. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of it all here (the Irish Examiner political columnists will have done a better job on that front) but from Michael Healy-Rae trying to be ‘brat’ on Tiktok, to Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch literally running away from members of the press at a count centre, there was enough to make you question the state of the Irish political landscape.

There were also a lot of questionable moments on the State expenditure side of things. This year, we heard that our new children’s hospital had racked up a whopping tab of €2.24bn. Some €336,000 was spent on a bike shed.