Cork has the highest number of secondary school students using online dating application Tinder while Kilkenny has the largest amount of students “addicted” their mobile phone, according to a new Irish survey.

The figures come from 4,822 secondary school students answers from across the State who took part in the Irish study website Studyclix’s survey, which was completed last week.

About 13 per cent of the total students revealed they used Tinder and Cork had the highest number at 22 per cent.

Luke Saunders, co-founder of Studyclix and a secondary school teacher in Sligo, said he was shocked the results of students using the dating application, some as young as 13-years-old.

“I couldn’t believe it. One of my third year students showed it to me on their phone. It’s risky and you can get adults pretending to be in that age bracket on the app,” he said.

“It calls in to question online safety for our students. As a secondary school teacher, it is very clear to me in my day to day teaching that the use of phones in school has increased and is very hard to monitor or safeguard.”

Nationally, 55 per cent of students said they were “addicted to their phone” and Kilkenny had the highest number of students at 74 per cent.

Mr Saunders said that particular statistic did not shock him “at all”.

“There’s a greater addiction among female students. Students are constantly checking their phones between class and trying during class too. It’s an increasing problem,” he said.

Facebook is still the most popular social media platform at 81 per cent with photograph sharing applications Snapchat and Instagram coming in second and third.

Cyber bullying

Mr Saunders said another worrying statistic was almost a quarter of students had witnessed cyber bullying in the last school year.

“The rates of cyber bullying were high as well, and perhaps unusually seemed to increase outside of the urban centres, which suggests to me that we have a long battle ahead when it comes to tackling this and other online issues.”

In terms of students’ health, Mr Saunders said only 3 per cent of the students surveyed said they smoked but 42 per cent “regularly” drank alcohol.

About 56 per cent of students admitted that school has been the most stressful thing in their life over the past year and almost a quarter said they had not taken part in physical education class during the week.

Future plans

Looking towards the future, about 41 per cent of students believed they would need to emigrate for work at some point in their future, while Roscommon students were the least likely to emigrate at 27 per cent and Waterford to most likely at 54 per cent.

Dublin had the highest number of students confident they would find work in their own county at 20 per cent and Louth has the highest number of student who believed they would not find work in their native county at 51 per cent.

Kerry was deemed to have the “hardest working” students with 39 per cent with a part-time job.