The European Commission announced last week that a new age verification app designed to protect children online would soon be made available to citizens across the EU.
The move is welcome. But it arrives against a backdrop of rising concern about youth screen time that has so far produced more presidential attention than concrete policy change.
The scale of the problem is not in question. At the end of 2025, the WHO European Region reported that 78% of children aged 7 to 9 across the EU region were spending at least two hours a day on screens at weekends, with 42% doing so on weekdays. Social media usage among young people has remained elevated since the pandemic years, showing little sign of abating. What makes this particularly striking is the contrast with other public health trends: last year, research found that 71% of European drinkers were buying or consuming less alcohol, and the Commission confirmed just last week that European smoking rates had fallen from 28% to 24% since 2012. Screen time appears to be the one unhealthy statistic that continues to move in the wrong direction.
The health consequences are becoming clearer. German organisation Stiftung Kindergesundheit linked the trend to rising sleep deprivation among young people, citing the blue light emitted by LED screens as a physiological driver. Their research found that three in four teenagers still use their smartphones in the final ten minutes before sleep, and one in four continue doing so after turning off the lights. The findings were striking enough that the Polish presidency made the mental health damage caused by digital habits a priority issue during its Council tenure.
More than a year has passed since the Polish presidency elevated this issue, and it is not obvious that the political momentum has been sustained. But the Cypriot presidency that followed did not carry the agenda forward with the same urgency, and the political momentum has visibly cooled.
Meanwhile, member states are not waiting: Italy’s senate introduced a draft law in April requiring platforms to end default profiling and obtain explicit consent for algorithmic personalisation, targeting the addictive design features that drive screen time rather than simply restricting access. If national legislatures are moving faster than the Commission, then the question now is whether the incoming Irish presidency will carry it forward, and there are reasonable grounds for doubt.
Sixteen of the top 20 global tech companies have their European headquarters or a significant presence in Dublin. Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok’s European operations: the list reads like a who’s who of the platforms most implicated in the youth screen time debate. Ireland has benefited enormously from this arrangement, both in tax revenues and in employment, and its regulators have not always acquitted themselves well when pushed to act against the sector’s interests. The Data Protection Commission’s slow handling of cross-border GDPR complaints drew sustained criticism from peers across the EU; the pattern does not inspire confidence that Dublin will press hard on child digital wellbeing when the same companies are involved.
Nor does the broader picture of Irish tech’s influence in Brussels: the day after the announcement, the Irish Commissioner Michael McGrath, who is responsible for the incoming Digital Fairness Act targeting addictive platform design, met Meta’s Vice President for Content Policy during a Silicon Valley visit.
None of this makes meaningful action impossible. A Council presidency can choose to champion issues that sit awkwardly with national economic interests, and Ireland has done so before on questions of climate and biodiversity.
Given the evidence now accumulating on what excessive screen time is doing to a generation of European children, the next presidency has little excuse to treat the issue as someone else’s problem.
