Broadcaster and Leaving Cert dad, Ray D'Arcy, is looking forward to his annual 'Run with Ray’ events around the country this month. He talks to Claire O’Mahony about the joy of radio, his children becoming teenagers and running au naturel!
Running is where Ray D’Arcy finds his happy place. No surprise then that he is the driving force behind the ‘Run with Ray’ events taking place across the country this month. He is a relative latecomer to running, however, even though he played every other sport as a child in Kildare.
His decision to do a triathlon before his 40th birthday, 20 years ago, necessitated learning how to swim, but it was the running part of the triathlon that hooked him. He hasn’t looked back since, and he now runs daily, but without the accessory of music or podcasts.
His wife, Jenny Kelly, introduced him to the concept of ‘raw dogging’, which sounds dodgy, but in this case, just means doing an activity like running without any added entertainment.
"It’s this thing that the younger generation are talking about now. I don’t listen to anything. I run in the morning, and it’s a good opportunity just to get your day in order in your head," Ray explains. "If I have a big interview on, I’ll go over that, and sometimes you come up with the best stuff, just thinking it through."
The broadcaster is in great form when we speak, full of book recommendations – he is clearly a prodigious reader – and bonhomie. The Kildare native has been a mainstay in media for three decades, and many of us have grown up with him, from his early days presenting the kids’ TV show, The Den, and his Today FM years, through to his stint as a Rose of Tralee host and now with The Ray D’Arcy Show, which debuted on RTÉ Radio One in 2015. "I'm very lucky. I love what I do," he observes.
He is equally content with life beyond the radio studio. He and Jenny were married in 2013. They have two children, Kate (18) and Tom, who turns 13 next month. What is life like in the D’Arcy household?
"It’s very calm," he says. "I'd say a huge part of that is because neither Jenny nor I drink. Not that we were big drinkers, but it has brought a calm into our life that you can only experience when you do it. Drink for a lot of reasons, even if you don't drink that much, just brings spikes in moods."
Their daughter Kate is doing her Leaving Cert this month and the family is rowing in to support her. "I was talking to a guy recently and he described having somebody in Leaving Cert as playing that winter Olympic sport, where you push the thing down and then everybody paves the way in front of it [curling]. It's like that and we're happy to do that. We're there for whatever she wants. I still have nightmares about my Leaving Cert, all these years later. Now, I don't share that with Kate…"
He continues: "Jenny and I are best friends and companions and husband and wife, and we've two healthy children and they're lovely. We're very lucky and we appreciate that."
He acknowledges that his children’s lives and his experience of growing up are different for a lot of reasons. "One of them is that I came from a family of nine, and now we have two children. We lived in a council house, a very small house, so it was completely different. As a father, you want to give your kids everything, yet you want to pass on some of your own values, which is probably an impossible task, but you do try."
Is he a strict dad? "No, but you’d have to ask my children. They'd say that we are stricter than their friends' parents. Now look, we're not. We've encountered strictness. We're not strict. We're very relaxed, and we're here for them. Obviously, there are rules, and all households have them. But we've often said, we're not laissez-faire and we're not dictatorial. We're somewhere in the middle."
As a family, they are keen on outdoor pursuits – sea swimming is a favourite, and Kate plays GAA and hockey, while Tom plays basketball and hockey. "Everyone has their own interests and they can exist independently of each other, which is a healthy thing," he says. Naturally, as his children get older, there has been a divergence of paths.
"Kate’s been a teenager for five years, so she went off and did her own thing. And we’re going to lose Tom soon now because he’s hitting 13 next month. You can just see it – I asked him for a hug the other day on the couch, and he wasn’t up for it. The same evening, his mother asked for a hug, but she got one."
Although he has presented a daily radio show for 25 years, he admits that he still gets nervous on occasion. "The ones that I get most nervous about are the ones that you feel you owe the people involved, that you feel you have to do a good job for them," he says. "They're mostly not well-known people who have decided, for whatever reason, to tell you their story. Oftentimes, it's a heart-breaking story, and you feel then under pressure not to mess it up."
The pressure, one can imagine, is to make a show that navigates the line between being informative and entertaining, and on a daily basis.
"I suppose most programmes eventually, unless they're current affairs or news programmes, they evolve around the person who's presenting them, their strengths and weaknesses and their interests. If not, it doesn't work because the person who's presenting it needs to feel strongly about things and be interested in things, or else it'll show," he says.
"In the early days, it was very much about finding my feet. I'd come from children's television. I was an adult, but probably hadn't really given a lot of thought to a lot of the stuff I should have because I didn't have to. Then radio allowed me to, because I had to form my own opinions about things rather than borrow somebody else's. It happened organically, and the format of the programme wasn't prescriptive when we started; it allowed us to do everything. We found that people were sharing their lives with us, and they trusted us. Now, we don't do as much as I'd like to for various reasons. But that was very encouraging."
A key moment came in 2008, when the then Minister for Health, Mary Harney, said that the government wouldn’t fund the HPV vaccine programme for 12-year-old girls, which would help prevent cervical cancer, because of the state of the national finances.
"We got an email from a guy who had lost his wife to cervical cancer, and now his daughter was coming of age to get the HPV vaccine, and he couldn't afford it. Then it became something, and we encouraged it, which we probably shouldn't have done, but we encouraged people to send emails to the Department of Health. At the time, the technology wasn't great, so we completely closed down their system. But this came from seeing an injustice, and then somebody putting a human face to that injustice. Then, when the listeners heard that, they went with it."
The role of a broadcaster is inherently performative, and no matter what’s going on behind the scenes, there’s a responsibility to the audience.
"One day, I was having a bad day, and I got on and I said it. Then a radio reviewer took me up on it at the end of the week. I'd say anybody who knows me half well would know if I'm not having a good day. But you have to do what you do. You have to be professional.
"I remember the late Larry Gogan told me in his latter years that they put one of those heart monitors on him for 24 hours. When he went back in for the results, the doctor said, ‘This is when you seem to be most relaxed. What are you doing in those hours?’ It was when he was on air when his heart rate was lowest. In a way, there's a bit of an escape in that you have to concentrate on what you are doing when you are on air. You can't be thinking about things that might be going on in your life."
Of course, one part of life that Ray welcomes is running, and his enthusiasm for this year’s ‘Run with Ray’ is clear. The campaign to get both runners and non-runners to do a 5km distance kicks off on June 16, with events in Cork, Waterford, Kilkenny, Drogheda and Dublin. It’s been going on and off for 14 years, initially with Today FM, before coming with Ray to RTÉ, with Covid putting a temporary halt to everyone’s canter. When ‘Run with Ray’ started, there were few opportunities for people to do 5 Ks.
"At the time," he recalls, "I loved running and I was talking about it, boring myself talking about it on air. I thought, how could you encourage people? And I thought, well, maybe 10K is a bit too much for people. The other thing was to bring the run to them. That was the idea that we would go into your town and we would set up a 5K, so you'd have no excuses."
Times have changed, with more people getting the benefits of running, with Ireland one of the leading lights in the global parkrun phenomenon. "Now it’s more of a social event," he says. "It's a chance for us to meet some of our listeners. It's a chance for us to get out to the regions in the Roadcaster, which is always good fun. It's an adventure and there's good energy about it."
