Grief works differently for everyone but anybody who has experienced loss will feel for Ronan Keating who has returned to Ireland to make a travel show, Ronan Keating’s Wild Atlantic, that is less about the sights and sounds of coastal Ireland than an articulation of his pain over the death nearly three years ago of his older brother Ciarán.
Keating has had a successful TV career between Boyzone reunions – he has hosted The One Show on the BBC and been a judge on The Voice Australia. He is a great travel show presenter too and speaks with genuine warmth about his love of the west of Ireland, recalling childhood holidays along the Atlantic coastline. But the sightseeing takes a back seat as he talks about Ciarán, who was killed in a car crash in 2023.
Ciarán was driving from his home in Westport to Sligo to watch his son Ruairí play for Cork City when he was killed in a collision. The driver of the other vehicle was later given a suspended sentence for careless driving causing death – a verdict Keating described as unjust.
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The anguish has stayed with the singer, and when he meets Ruairí in west Cork, he struggles with the emotion. “I never get to say it, but like I was the baby. He was my older brother, eldest brother, and he was my hero, and I always looked up to him, you know,” he says. His nephew talks about how, whenever he scores a goal for Cork City, he looks to the heavens, where he is sure his father is looking down.
“It’s the same for me playing football too. I always look up and still think I can see him there,” says Ruairí. “It’s always the hardest part as well after games. I used to check my phone. The first thing I’d see is my dad’s name. Looking at my phone and not seeing that any more – it’s really hard.”
The moment is heartbreaking and Keating’s pain comes to the surface a second time in the episode when he visits a Buddhist temple on the Beara Peninsula. As he sits opposite a chant master who is leading a prayer, he is genuinely upset as he looks inward and reflects on his loss.
This isn’t the first time Keating has been emotional on camera. He was open and vulnerable throughout the 2025 Boyzone documentary, No Matter What – one of the most unflinching music documentaries of the past several years.
But whatever regrets he felt over his music career pale beside the death of a family member. In Ronan Keating’s Wild Atlantic, his feeling of loss for his brother is raw and real and that thread of pain running through this series places it in a category of one: it is a pilgrimage home that doubles as an unfiltered and very moving meditation on grief.