It is one of the hottest days of the year in the west Dublin suburb of Castleknock, and a teenage girl is in her back garden playing football with her friends.Her friends, though, are not actually in the garden with her; they are in their own homes, their own back gardens, playing keepie-uppies over video call. This is a regular occurrence, 13-year-old Myla Jain says, with the group chat of 10 classmates convening over video call most evenings once they get home from school. “I don’t mind being with them on a call, but it’s probably better in person,” she says. That hunger for physical connection is clear. She loves going to Blanchardstown shopping centre with her friends, watching films, and says she can’t wait to be old enough to go to house parties. She plays basketball with her next-door neighbour in their garden, she loves hockey and plays most evenings after school. But like many girls her age in Ireland, so much of her life is lived on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. The music she listens to is driven by what she hears on viral videos, “snap streaks” cannot be broken, and the 10-person group chat is alive every evening and weekend. The increasingly pervasive presence of social media in the lives of female teenagers is one of the strongest themes we came across when we asked them what it was like to grow up in Ireland. They also spoke about the skewed perceptions of consent held by some of their male peers, their impression of what it meant to be a woman in the modern world, the importance of their friendships and the pressures of the education system here. This is their story of girlhood.Becoming a womanSaoirse McHugh: 'I feel like this is such a universal experience for women.' Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision