Ray D'Arcy is back on the road with his 5K roadshow, Run with Ray. He talks to Donal O’Donoghue about his mental health advocacy, family matters, the return of The Den, and The Late Late Show.
"Thirty-five years ago, this summer, I drove into RTÉ for the very first time," says Ray D’Arcy. We’re sitting in a room that once hosted guests of the Late Late Show (of which more anon) and while the broadcaster is ostensibly talking about Run with Ray, his beat on the street which returns this week, other memories are stirred.
Maybe it’s talk about The Den, briefly resurrected back in 2020, or the reeling in of a life on radio and TV that began for the Kildare man in the summer of 1988. "I came in to interview for Jo-Maxi," he says of a new young people’s TV show.
"I had to send in a tape which I made with my younger sister, Joan. There was a guy in Kildare who owned the only video machine in town and we filmed a five-minute tape. I did some press-ups, I made my sister disappear, and did a few other things and that’s what got me in the door here."
35 years later – having been out the door for a few years with Today FM – the father-of-two is still raring for road. Literally. "Can we make this quick?" he half-jokes in his shorts, runners, and baseball cap. He looks fit (lean and grizzled) but then he does knock off a marathon every week – that’s 42km over six mornings.
He has always been disciplined. Last time we met, he showed me a bar of very dark chocolate – one of his few vices – of which he nibbles one small square daily. He will be 59 in September and with two youngish children – Katie is 16, Tom is 10 – he is beset by the maths of the older father.
When Tom hits the major milestones (college, 21st, etc) what age will he be? Yet the genes must be good: his mother, Mary, is hale and hearty. Isn’t she also regarded as a bit of a saint on account of her good work (not to mention rearing nine children)? "Ah yes, Saint Mary," says Ray and laughs. "She’d hate to be known as that."
Last February, Mary D’Arcy’s son was awarded an honorary fellowship of the RCSI Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery. It was in recognition of the broadcaster’s contribution to mental health advocacy. There was a big day out in town: "gowns and scrolls and the rest" as Ray puts it. In the audience was his wife, Jenny, and Tom (Katie was away).
The honouree stood on the stage while a speaker described Ray’s life and times and deeds. "She was five minutes into this very detailed CV, and I hadn’t even graduated from college at that stage," he says and laughs. So, he politely requested the epic citation be cut short. Earlier, on the way into the ceremony, Ray rang his mother to tell her about the award. "Mam just asked me 'Why?’" he laughs. No fear ever that the Kildare man, third eldest in a family of nine reared in a council house, was ever going to get too big for his boots. Or his runners.
When we spoke, D’Arcy was in the middle of the family holidays, a week in the sunny southeast, followed by a week at a campsite in Spain (a family first). He had driven to Dublin to do some promotional work for Run with Ray including this cover story.
Before we begin, he seems to be already looking for the door but he quickly warms up, his natural empathy and curiosity taking over. "I’m fascinated by what it means to be human," he says at one point and Run with Ray, the first since 2019, is a case in point.
"It will be our sixth: four with Today FM, two with RTÉ," he says. "I still meet people who tell me that they started running through Run with Ray and that it changed their lives. Often, we’re thinking about the big picture and asking why the country doesn’t do this or that or whatever, but often the fixes are almost molecular. That’s why the 5K Run with Ray first happened."
He recalls how his interest in mental health (he has a degree in Psychology) was first piqued. "I was travelling to Derry for You’re A Star when I got talking to the woman seated beside me on the plane. She was coming from St Luke’s hospital, where she was having chemotherapy for cancer. She told me that her cancer diagnosis was in a strange way a positive thing for her because she had been suffering with depression all her life and because it was a hidden, unseen illness, she felt that she could not tell anyone about it. It was so shocking to me that this poor woman thought that her cancer was a good thing. When I told that story on air, Aware [the national depression charity] contacted me and asked me to be an ambassador and it went on from there."
So how is his own mental health? "Never better! There are very few guarantees in this life, but if you get out and physically move in fresh air, you will feel better afterward."
And he does feel good. Of all the names mentioned in connection with The Late Late Show’s successor, Ray D’Arcy was perhaps surprisingly absent. Did he have any interest? "I didn’t consider the LLS and I wasn’t asked," he says. "Nobody was asked other than the person (Patrick Kielty) who ended up doing it."
He gets Ryan Tubridy’s reasoning to put family first. "The great Gay Byrne, who I idolised, once gave an interview to our radio show where he said he regretted the time he gave to the whole thing. I didn’t need to hear that. I knew. When I was doing six days a week, Tom started crying one day when I was going to work. That was the moment for me. I realised then it was not right. It was not sustainable for me, six days a week. Now Tom and I have brilliant Saturdays together. Tom loves music and plays bass guitar so I’m living my life vicariously through him. I never played guitar, but I was the lead singer, or lead shouter, in a band way back when."
From the beginning, he always wanted to be a dad. "I always thought that I was going to have a huge family," he says. "Even though it was often chaos growing up as part of a big family, I loved being part of that community. There’s nothing like a big family and, of course, it made me what I am. The interaction with my siblings and then interacting with their friends taught me so much. Having five sisters meant I was never shy or awkward in the company of women because I was surrounded by them all the time."
After he married Jenny Kelly in 2013, fatherhood realigned everything, not least his relationship with his parents. "It made me want to connect more with them. Tom and my father got along like a house on fire and that was beautiful to see." His father, army man Ray Snr, who died in 2017. "I also learned to appreciate more than ever all that my Mam did for us down the years."
Ray and his eight siblings grew up in a three-bed house (a fourth bedroom was added later) in Kildare. "You couldn’t fall out of bed because the beds were so close together," he says. From the get-go, he seemed to know his path or at least possessed the work ethic and ambition (at nine he had his own paper round; at 15, he was making a shilling as a DJ; and was a regular on local festival committees in his late teens).
He dreamed of becoming a doctor (inspired by a stay in St Vincent’s Hospital when he was 10) but would miss out on Medicine by a single point with his Leaving Cert results. His other CAO choice, Communications, was nixed as he didn’t have the required Honour in English, so it was on to Psychology. Following graduation at 20, he made his name in children’s TV (Jo Maxi and most famously as ringmaster of that anarchic kids/adult show, The Den) before moving to radio at 36.
In 2020, in the early days of the lockdown, The Den was briefly resurrected: D’Arcy back with Zig and Zag and the rest of the crew. It was a winner. 10-year-old Tom also got to see his old man doing the gig for the first time. "He loved it and that was special for me. And now Tom, like a lot of other people, asks me ‘Why didn’t The Den come back for good?’ and I don’t have the answer."
On his radio show in January 2022, D’Arcy had a swipe at RTÉ about the show’s axing. "Everyone on the team is up for it," he says now. "However, the good news is that we had a reunion recently for a global streaming service and while I can’t say too much about that now, I will say ‘Watch this space!’" Otherwise, he's looking forward to his involvement in the fast-evolving world of radio and podcasting. "I’m fascinated by technology," he says, recalling how in his fledgling days as a DJ in the local halls, he was always pumping his profits back into new speakers and decks and the rest.
From next week, Ray D’Arcy is back on the deck of the RTÉ Roadcaster, taking the show on the road, from Buncrana to Dublin via stops at Sligo, Mullingar and Avondale in Wicklow. He says that such outside broadcasts give energy to the show as well as himself.
The critics occasionally lay into him, but he says that’s part of the gig (although despite his many years in broadcasting I suspect it still hurts). "If you take the good you also have to take the bad and while the latter might upset you for a while, you’ve just got to move on." And he does, physically as much as anything else.
He took up running at the age of 39 to compete in a triathlon and similarly learned to swim from scratch. "An old head on young shoulders" is how he once described his younger self and now heading into his 59th year, he’s doing the maths, surprised by how long he’s been in the door but with no intention of making an exit any time soon.
