Latest news with #TheRayD'ArcyShow
Irish Daily Mirror
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
Ray D'Arcy prepares to say goodbye to his mam as funeral details announced
Devastated Ray D'Arcy will prepare to say goodbye to his beloved mam Mary today after she passed away last week. The RTE star has been left heartbroken after the mother-of-nine passed away "peacefully" at Naas Hospital in Co Kildare on July 18. Her death notice reads that she will be "sadly missed" by her "loving children" Joe, Jackie, Ray, Hughie, Anne, Paul, Marianne, Claire and Joan, sons and daughters in law, her 16 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, sister Angela, brother Bill, sisters in law, nieces, nephews, extended family, neighbours and friends. In 2001, Mary D'Arcy interviewed and sang with star of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, in her kitchen in Co Kildare for her son's radio show, The Ray D'Arcy Show, which was airing on Today FM at the time. In 2019, Ray said he didn't hug his mum until six or seven years ago. He said that having children changed his view of the world and brought him even closer to his mother. "I didn't hug my mum until six or seven years ago," Ray told the RTE Guide at the time. "But I hug her all the time now and tell her that I love her. I'd never have done that years ago but as you get older, especially when you have your own children, you see the world differently. "Also when you have children, you want to keep the generations connected and you feel more of a pull home. You want your children to be part of this family and to know the mother that you knew." Ray said his mother would've been referred to locally as a "saint". "She's probably referred to locally as a saint. My mum is amazing, a very thoughtful, insightful and intelligent woman. She's now in her 80s but travels to Dublin most Wednesdays to go to a movie and can chat about any current news story." Her removal by Glennons Funeral Directors will be on Wednesday morning to arrive at St. Brigids Parish Church, Kildare Town for requiem mass at 11am. Burial will take place afterwards in St. Conleths cemetery, Kildare Town. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.
Irish Independent
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Ray D'Arcy's ‘amazing' mother Mary to be laid to rest on Wednesday
Mother of nine children, Mary D'Arcy, passed away 'peacefully' at Naas Hospital in Co Kildare on Friday, July 18. Kildare born radio and television presenter Ray D'Arcy had a close relationship with his mother. In 2001 Mary D'Arcy even interviewed and sang with star of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, in her kitchen in Co Kildare for her son's radio show, The Ray D'Arcy Show, which was airing on Today FM at the time. In 2019, during an interview with the RTÉ Guide's Donal O'Donoghue, Ray, who has two children, Kate and Tom with his wife Jenny, said that having children changed his view of the world and brought him even closer to his mother. 'I didn't hug my mum until six or seven years ago,' Ray told Donal. 'But I hug her all the time now and tell her that I love her. I'd never have done that years ago but as you get older, especially when you have your own children, you see the world differently. "Also when you have children, you want to keep the generations connected and you feel more of a pull home. You want your children to be part of this family and to know the mother that you knew.' Describing his mother Mary, Ray added: 'She's probably referred to locally as a saint. My mum is amazing, a very thoughtful, insightful and intelligent woman. She's now in her 80s but travels to Dublin most Wednesdays to go to a movie and can chat about any current news story.' Since news broke of Mary's passing, has been flooded with tribute messages remembering a lady who brought 'sunshine to everyone lucky enough to have crossed her path'. 'Aunty Mary was such a warm and welcoming presence in my life,' wrote one of hundreds of mourners paying tribute to Mary on 'I have such fond memories of her open house during my visits to Kildare. She always made me feel right at home, with her kindness, her generous spirit, and her lovely homemade bread. "She was also a truly remarkable woman who will be deeply missed by all who knew her. Thinking of you all during this very difficult time and keeping you in my thoughts and prayers.' ADVERTISEMENT "What a wonderful, strong woman Mary was,' added another mourner. 'A true lady who brought help, encouragement and sunshine to everyone lucky enough to have crossed her path. "Condolences to all the family on your very sad loss. Thinking of all of you. Rest easy now Mary, your work is done. You will be sorely missed in Kildare Town.' Mary's remains will repose at McWey's Funeral Home, Abbeyview in Kildare Town from 4pm on Tuesday July 22, concluding with rosary at 7pm. Follow Independent Kildare on Facebook Removal by Glennon's Funeral Directors will take place on Wednesday morning, July 23, to arrive at St. Brigid's Parish Church in Kildare Town for requiem mass at 11am. Burial will take place afterwards in St. Conleth's Cemetery in Kildare Town. "Mary D'Arcy née Bonar, Campion Crescent, Kildare Town, Co Kildare,' read her death notice on 'Peacefully on July 18, 2025, at Naas Hospital. "Pre deceased by her husband Ray (Snr). Sadly missed by her loving children Joe, Jackie, Ray, Hughie, Anne, Paul, Marianne, Claire and Joan, sons and daughters in law, her 16 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, sister Angela, brother Bill, sisters in law, nieces, nephews, extended family, neighbours and friends.'
Irish Independent
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Ray D'Arcy's ‘amazing' mother to be laid to rest on Wednesday
Mother of nine children, Mary D'Arcy, passed away 'peacefully' at Naas Hospital in Co Kildare on Friday, July 18. Kildare born radio and television presenter Ray D'Arcy had a close relationship with his mother. In 2001 Mary D'Arcy even interviewed and sang with star of The Pogues, Shane MacGowan, in her kitchen in Co Kildare for her son's radio show, The Ray D'Arcy Show, which was airing on Today FM at the time. In 2019, during an interview with the RTÉ Guide's Donal O'Donoghue, Ray, who has two children, Kate and Tom with his wife Jenny, said that having children changed his view of the world and brought him even closer to his mother. 'I didn't hug my mum until six or seven years ago,' Ray told Donal. 'But I hug her all the time now and tell her that I love her. I'd never have done that years ago but as you get older, especially when you have your own children, you see the world differently. "Also when you have children, you want to keep the generations connected and you feel more of a pull home. You want your children to be part of this family and to know the mother that you knew.' Describing his mother Mary, Ray added: 'She's probably referred to locally as a saint. My mum is amazing, a very thoughtful, insightful and intelligent woman. She's now in her 80s but travels to Dublin most Wednesdays to go to a movie and can chat about any current news story.' Since news broke of Mary's passing, has been flooded with tribute messages remembering a lady who brought 'sunshine to everyone lucky enough to have crossed her path'. 'Aunty Mary was such a warm and welcoming presence in my life,' wrote one of hundreds of mourners paying tribute to Mary on 'I have such fond memories of her open house during my visits to Kildare. She always made me feel right at home, with her kindness, her generous spirit, and her lovely homemade bread. "She was also a truly remarkable woman who will be deeply missed by all who knew her. Thinking of you all during this very difficult time and keeping you in my thoughts and prayers.' ADVERTISEMENT "What a wonderful, strong woman Mary was,' added another mourner. 'A true lady who brought help, encouragement and sunshine to everyone lucky enough to have crossed her path. "Condolences to all the family on your very sad loss. Thinking of all of you. Rest easy now Mary, your work is done. You will be sorely missed in Kildare Town.' Mary's remains will repose at McWey's Funeral Home, Abbeyview in Kildare Town from 4pm on Tuesday July 22, concluding with rosary at 7pm. Follow Independent Kildare on Facebook Removal by Glennon's Funeral Directors will take place on Wednesday morning, July 23, to arrive at St. Brigid's Parish Church in Kildare Town for requiem mass at 11am. Burial will take place afterwards in St. Conleth's Cemetery in Kildare Town. "Mary D'Arcy née Bonar, Campion Crescent, Kildare Town, Co Kildare,' read her death notice on 'Peacefully on July 18, 2025, at Naas Hospital. "Pre deceased by her husband Ray (Snr). Sadly missed by her loving children Joe, Jackie, Ray, Hughie, Anne, Paul, Marianne, Claire and Joan, sons and daughters in law, her 16 grandchildren and two great grandchildren, sister Angela, brother Bill, sisters in law, nieces, nephews, extended family, neighbours and friends.'
RTÉ News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Ray D'Arcy on raising teenagers in a "calm" household
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."
RTÉ News
14-05-2025
- Health
- RTÉ News
Can I love myself or am I just being a big old narcissist?
Opinion: A philosophy of self-love would encourage us to welcome relationships, not deny them in favour of self-absorption Self-love, and associated acts of self-care, have grown exponentially as both an online self-help movement and therapeutic strategy presented in accessible guides locatable in the "pop psychology" and "health and well-being" sections of bookstores. But the question remains, just what is self-love? Can it turn toxic by concealing what it really is, namely, a form of self-absorption? Reframed from a philosophical point of view, I do not think self-love reduces to self-absorption; warnings may be flagged here at the outset, of course. Certainly self-love may fall prey to the fixation on one's own needs and identity. Time magazine recently published a not so uncritical column on the self-help movement known simply as "self-love" in just this critical light. The author argues it is a therapeutic strategy gone wrong; self-love means to confine or trap me within myself. The predictable outcome is a toxic form of possessive individualism that reimagines our journey of self-discovery as a venturing forth to the other person (spouse, friends, colleagues, acquaintances) solely for the sake of self-satisfaction. Simply put, self-love amounts to nothing more than what philosophers call narcissism. Obviously if I cannot connect (genuinely) with my spouse, friends, colleagues, because I use them, then it follows that I likely will be lonely, trapped within myself. From RTÉ Radio 1's The Ray D'Arcy Show, Ann Marie Creavan, Psychologist, University of Limerick joins Ray to talk about Ireland's high rates of loneliness Some recent cognitive science appears to align with such a critical sentiment. Judson Brewer's The Craving Mind indicates that neuroscientific research on the chemical structure of the reward centres of the brain appear to encourage a particularly narcissistic explanation of self-love. The physical pains we may feel when a lover is absent (my craving for you) reveals dopamine deprivation, nothing more. Brewer's excellent book demonstrates that the craving for the other instead brings into focus the satisfaction and relief my brain undergoes once I receive a "hit" from my romantic partner. What I miss, then, is myself, or the selfish feeling of having met my chemical needs. These are serious warnings and accusations levied at self-love. I agree they constitute real dangers and pitfalls. Self-love can turn into self-absorption. But does it as a rule have to do so? Is there a healthy, more outward facing form of self-love, which does not lead to utilitarian loneliness? This is where philosophy may enter the scene; it may offer an alternative for our consideration. For hundreds of years, the discipline of modern philosophy has been in the business of debating (with much technical jargon) the very nature and structure of the self. Yes, loneliness has become more visible and it is a real concern, especially after the pandemic. But much philosophy in recent decades indicates we are naturally integrated with others, at a structural level. Remembering this truth is itself a therapeutic response to self-love gone wrong. What if philosophy has told us the main lesson to learn about loving ourselves is that we simply have to remember what we already are: a creature dependent on and connected to others. In short, this act of remembering constitutes an act of philosophical therapy. We may call it a contemplative exercise in memory recall. Or we may call it an act of taking stock of our social networks and the mindful recognition of our structural immersion in the lives of others. The philosophical exercise of self-love invites us to recall (literally engage ourselves in the act of recollection) the way we use language, participate in social media, and talk to others at office, the coffee shop, the pub, the gym. Existential philosophers of the past 100 years have said no individual is an isolated reef (e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part III, chapter 1). To continue with the sea metaphor, perhaps it is preferable to observe that you and I live like a coral reef, which consists of a large superstructure integrated with a vast network of other reefs. Yes, each reef has its own integrity as a single reef, but has an inbuilt relationship with other reefs, they are attached one to the other, whether they realise it or not. Philosophy can serve to remind us of what we have forgotten: the basic interconnection we already enjoy with others. Self-love, then, cannot really be self-love if I isolate myself from others. Loving myself involves how I love the other person, and loving the other person involves how I love myself. Philosophical therapy in the form of self-love cultivates the recollection of our basic connection with others. In that connection, we can enjoy the increase of self-love, just as much as we can become aware of its pitfalls. You and I are not isolated anyway, so a philosophy of self-love would encourage us to welcome relationships, not deny them in favour of self-absorption. Plato said 2,500 years ago that love itself is a philosopher (Symposium, 204b). If that is the case, then we are all philosophers, we just simply need a reminder now and then what it means to see the world as a philosopher—especially advocates of the self-help movement of self-care.
