Keith Walsh: 'Men my age have a lot of trauma they haven’t dealt with'

His departure from RTÉ 2FM left Walsh facing some difficult mental health issues. Therapy followed, and he has since written about his experiences

Keith Walsh, pictured here at Newbridge Skateboard Park, brings his Pure Mental play to Cork, Killarney and Limerick.  Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

When Keith Walsh answers the phone from his hometown of Newbridge, Co Kildare, he’s not at home with his wife and kids, but in the midst of late evening rehearsals for his first-ever self-written play, Pure Mental. 

“This is all new language to me,” he admits as he describes the process. The broadcaster and former RTÉ 2FM host actually studied theatre in college, but apart from some appearances in The 24 Hour Plays in the Abbey, an autobiographical one-man show is unexplored territory. 

“This is way outside of my comfort zone,” he says. “Working in radio, you’re used to having a script or a prompt but if you forget what you’re doing, you just play a song. On stage, there’s nowhere to hide.

“I’m also sitting there thinking: ‘who is going to give a shite? You lost your job, who cares, move on.’ So I’m trying to silence that as well.”

 The origin of Pure Mental comes from the aforementioned. After seven years with 2FM, Walsh left RTÉ in September 2020. What followed was a difficult period for the Co Longford native.

“When Breakfast Republic finished up, my wife suggested I see a therapist because I felt pretty rotten about it. I was probably behaving a bit manically,” Walsh says.

“So, I thought it was a good time to check in with my mental health and make sure I wasn’t getting angry and that I could deal with it properly. It was the best thing I could have done.” 

During his time in therapy, Walsh started to write again, which he hadn’t done since his days creating the comedy sketches that originally got him into radio. He eventually ended up with a pile of short stories about his life.

“Because I was going to therapy at the time, a lot of the stories that were landing on the page were about my childhood and how I felt about the breakfast show finishing up and those types of things. When I was finished, I sent them to Janet Moran and that was it.” 

Walsh has known Moran, who is directing the play, for over 20 years. Together, the pair have spent the past year writing and rehearsing over Zoom. Soon, Walsh’s local Riverbank Arts Centre got on board and  Pure Mental eventually came to life.

“I think somewhere in my consciousness, I was trying to turn what was a big negative into a positive,” Walsh says. “I guess I kind of thought to myself: ‘if you think you’re so great that RTÉ shouldn’t have fired you, go prove it to yourself’.” 

 The thought of sharing such personal experiences on stage would scare any performer, but for Walsh, Pure Mental presented an opportunity to maybe encourage others to look after their mental health as well.

“I didn’t set out to write a play, I wrote short stories,” he says. “And I was always surprised by what came out, like traumas from my past. For example, when I was in first year of school, a friend of mine took his last breath in my arms and I had never really talked about that.

“I feel like kids who grew up in the ‘80s were second-class citizens. It was a weird time for children. I think a lot of people, especially men, my age in Ireland have a lot of trauma they haven’t dealt with.” 

Walsh considers himself lucky not only for the opportunity to tour the country with his own play but also because he’s come out of the past year with his mental health in a good place.

“Men have a particular habit of backing themselves into a corner and I would have been one of them. I kept saying everything was grand until not only was it not grand, it was an absolute catastrophe,” he says.

“And that’s often what happens. We don’t talk about the small things and they build up and become something massive that we can’t deal with anymore. Making sure that you’re healthy mentally is an ongoing job.

“The reason I want to talk about it is to help normalise it to the point where it’s talked about like going to the gym. I still check in with my therapist and I actually gave up drinking as well and I feel great. I feel positive, I feel in control. I now have the tools to make sure that bad days don’t turn into bad weeks and that's invaluable.” 

• Pure Mental is at the Everyman Theatre in Cork on Sunday November 21; the INEC in Killarney on Wednesday November 24; and the Belltable in Limerick on Friday, November 26. For tickets see riverbank.ie.