A bright spring day. A dad and his toddler son pass you by, out for a stroll in the welcome sunshine. They're heading along the pavement in a leafy Dublin suburb towards the local park.
It's a lovely spot, with good-quality playground equipment for all ages, and even a little coffee kiosk so Dad can enjoy a mochaccino while he watches Junior swing in the secure swingsets designed for the smallest toddlers, or climb the couple of steps to the low slide.
Not that there's much chance of that - as they pass you notice, at first, that Dad is scrolling on his phone as he pushes the Bugaboo stroller with one hand. And then you realise that Junior has his own device, and he's also flicking through content like a pro. Fat chance of the swing or the slide competing for his attention with the virtual entertainment at his fingertips.
Last week, a 20-year-old woman, 'Kaley', was awarded $3million in damages by a Los Angeles jury after they found she had been addicted to YouTube and Instagram at a young age because their parent companies, Google and Meta, had designed them that way. She had not, she argued, been alerted to the likelihood of becoming addicted to social media. The case has been hailed as a watershed and a breakthrough, but is anyone really suggesting this judgment tells us anything we didn't already know?
For at least ten years, we've been warned about the devices and techniques used by social media companies to keep us scrolling, to hold our attention and to lure us back if we happened to log out of our accounts for so much as a minute.
Algorithms analyse your interests, spot patterns in your usage and bombard you with content tailored to your own particular tastes. The colour red is used in 'notification' alerts because of its associations with urgency and alarm. There's evidence that 'likes' and 'follows' light up the same reward centres in your brain as certain class-A drugs.
There is even the deeply sinister evidence that your phone eavesdrops on your conversations, the better to anticipate your next search. Is anyone truly surprised that these 'coincidences' weren't just urban myths after all?
Mr Bugaboo has more than enough information to know that the device he placed in his baby's hands is already doing that child untold harm. Modern parents are suckers for every new child-rearing theory, whether on diet, potty training, sleep patterns or education. According to a report in the London Times last week, some particularly ambitious parents began signing their pre-schoolers up for French classes when they heard Goldman Sachs was planning to open a Paris office.
To your average well-informed new mum or dad, formula milk is the devil's buttermilk, and baby food has to be organic, artisanal and additive-free. And then they go and hand their nippers the cognitive equivalent of a packet of 20 Major and a box of matches.
But at least we know the future health consequences of smoking. Addictions to social media, to mindless, endless scrolling, and to ever-more-sophisticated apps are such recent phenomena we have no way of knowing what the long-term effects on a brain of any age, young or old, might be.
Am I increasing my chances of dementia, for example, by relying entirely on my sat-nav rather than my memory, my map-reading abilities or my inherent instincts honed over millennia of evolution to find my way to a friend's house on the northside?
If you're constantly angered, upset or saddened by content you see online, how does that impact on your capacity of empathy with real-life situations?
If your choice of podcasts or your X feed all come from the same echo-chamber, how can you expect to engage with or even understand conflicting opinions? If you need voice notes to remind you to buy milk, or AI to compose a simple email, what's that doing to your poor, neglected, underused grey matter?
And that's before we get to factoring in the known dangers for kids on social media and the internet. As long ago as 2018, the then-Minister for Higher Education, Mary Mitchell O'Connor, professed herself 'shocked' by reports that a majority of boys in Ireland first viewed porn before the age of 13. If anything, considering most kids get their first smartphone under the age of ten and some as young as six, they're now exposed to hardcore content much earlier. What have we really done to prevent it?
There was much controversy when the 2025 Budget contained provision for €9million to buy pouches for schools to store pupils' smartphones during class. Heaven forbid their parents, who are supplying them with these indisputably dangerous devices, might be asked to take responsibility for keeping them out of the classrooms.
School principals have reported that a surprising amount of opposition to the removal of phones from the classrooms, or even from school grounds altogether, comes from parents who insist they need to be in contact with their children at all times.
Yet a simple 'dumb phone' would achieve that end. Why are modern parents so fearful of standing up to their children? There's a pathetic anti-vaping ad on radio at the moment in which two quivering parents debate which of them will tackle their teen about that dangerous habit: does the option of stopping pocket money for a kid who's spending it on nicotine never occur to these muppets?
When did saying 'no' to your child whether about vapes drink or smartphones become child abuse?
Legal experts predict that we'll now see more damages claims by people addicted to their phones and more evidence of the harm those habits are causing.
But how much more evidence do modern parents like Mr Bugaboo on his way to the park so he and his toddler can sit and scroll in peace really need?
What a tangled web men weave
Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield couldn't even bring himself to say JK Rowling's name in a recent interview because she has the cheek to prioritise the rights and safety of women over the feelings and fetishes of men.
He's one of a number of 'male supremacist' actors including Pedro Pascal and David Tennant who demand that men's right to put on lipstick and use women's changing rooms should trump women's right to be alarmed by blokes who are so determined to get into those female-only spaces in the first place.
Now the first female Olympic chief Kirsty Coventry has decreed athletes must compete according to their biological sex. She hasn't 'banned transwomen' by the way they're free to enter male competition.
It's clear the tide is turning against trans ideology but it looks like a lot of men and male-dominated institutions like our own ESB won't give up without a fight.
Trouble with a capital tee
It seems that Tiger Woods is lucky to be alive after he clipped a truck in his Range Rover and rolled it over while allegedly 'driving under the influence' in Florida last week.
He certainly looked the worse for wear in those mugshots taken after his arrest. Whatever his poison that night - he's been charged with failing to take a test - there's little doubt that the man is a tad accident-prone behind the wheel.
There was that famous incident in 2009 when his then wife Elin smashed the back window of his Cadillac with a golf club; he was arrested for drink-driving in 2017; and in 2021 he shattered his right leg in a similar crash when he was trapped under his car.
Time to get a chauffeur as the online wits have noted. He's better at driving a golf ball than a Golf.
What I want to know about former Prince Andrew’s second-hand mobile home is: where did he get it?
Did he haggle for it at a halting site or bag a bargain on Done-Deal because from the look of it whoever got him to pay £26,000 (€30,000) for the 14-year-old mobile home saw him coming. They didn't even bother to scrape the mossy damp patches off the outside which doesn't augur well for the state of the interior décor.
It's perched on blocks in the garden of Marsh Lodge—the much-reduced circumstances in which he is to live—and is said to be intended for his security detail since there's no room in the five-bed house for staff.
At least that's the story—but given he can't afford ski holidays in Verbier keep your eyes peeled in the caravan parks around Tramore this summer...