Mullingar teen being ‘Raised by the Village’

A Mullingar teenager features on the first episode of the new series of RTÉ’s Raised by the Village, which takes young people into the heart of rural Ireland to learn about life in a close-knit community.

Fifteen-year-old Karl Griffin from Lakepoint is a TY student at St Finian’s College, and an avid gamer.

After seeing an advertisement on social media looking for participants for the new series, which starts this Sunday on RTÉ One, his mother Paula got in touch with the producers of Raised by the Village as she was concerned about the amount of time Karl was spending in his room playing computer games.

“Karl was a gamer whose life revolved around his PC. He has friends, but the friends also play games. We were worried that he was spending so much time online,” Paula told the Westmeath Examiner.

Like every other teenager in Raised by the Village, Karl had to go and live with a rural family without any access to his devices. He was sent to spend a week with the Hynes family at their award winning dairy farm in the Cork village of Aherla. He is one of eight teenagers from urban areas selected to spend time with families located in remote rural areas to see if it will help them re-balance their lives.

Under the watchful eye of one of Ireland’s top psychotherapists, Dr Richard Hogan, the teens take part in local activities, experiencing an early-to-rise, wi-fi free outdoor lifestyle that’s a million miles away from their worlds of PlayStation, TikTok, fast food, late nights and all-day lie-ins.

How did Karl survive a week of hard graft on a farm without any gaming? You will have to tune in to RTÉ One this Sunday, March 24 at 6.30pm to find out.