My Childhood with Keith Barry: ‘I borrowed my dad’s jacket to work as a magician at 14’

My Childhood with Keith Barry: 'I borrowed my dad's jacket to work as a magician at 14'

“That set changed the course of my life. My parents and older sister Michelle would pretend to be fooled by me performing tricks. I got a different set for Christmas for years after that and got a little better at fooling them every time.” Barry’s career wasn’t an obvious choice for a child from the Williamstown suburb of Waterford City.

The childhood he describes there is a simple one. “I’d play in the garden with our dogs, cycle to see my friends, or they would cycle to me,” he says. “We’d set up a ramp for our bikes or string a net across the garden to play tennis.

We might venture into the nearby fields to explore derelict buildings that we called haunted houses. We’d climb trees and catch tadpoles. It was brilliant.” His mother’s parents lived next door and Barry spent time with them after school while his mother was at work.

He tells of walking home through the fields and arriving into his granny with the words, “Two or three — that’s all I’d have to say for her to hand me two or three biscuits,” he says, with a laugh. “She was a great granny.” Barry attended the nearby Waterpark Primary School until he was eight but left when the school was restructured and changed location. Instead of moving to the new location, his parents enrolled him in Mount Sion as his father’s parents lived nearby and he could walk to their house for lunch and after school.

However, none of his old friends went there and Barry’s outsider status led to him being bullied. “It wasn’t the sort of bullying where you could stand up for yourself either,” he says. “If you hit them back, there would be a gang waiting to beat you up after school.

You just had to put up with it.” Magic proved to be a distraction. He would practise constantly and perform in front of anyone who cared to watch. One of the magic magazines he read as a teenager had an article about table-hopping magicians who would perform tricks for diners in restaurants.

The then 14-year-old Barry borrowed his father’s suit jacket and went into Waterford City to ask restaurant owners if they would let him do this. “The first place I tried was The Wine Vault and, in a stroke of luck, its owner David Dennison had seen table-hopping magic in France,” he says. “He gave me a chance and I ended up performing in his restaurant every Friday for years.

I even got business cards printed on a machine in the City Square Shopping Centre and handed them out to everyone.” His parents — Ken and Kitty — supported his hobby, dropping him off and picking him up every Friday and bringing him to local talent shows. Barry speculates that he may have inherited his love of the limelight from his father. Ken was an entrepreneur who founded Tipperary Crystal and Smart Telecom but he was also a talented singer.

Barry says he played in showbands and “could have been a professional”. He adds: “But when he met Mum, she said he had to choose between showbiz and her. She didn’t want her husband to be on the road six nights a week.

He chose her but he remained a man who loved a singsong.” Kitty, on the other hand, was “the more reserved of the two, the one who kept our home together”. Barry is close to his mother but had a special relationship with his father. “We butted heads when I was a teenager but then became best friends,” he says.

“Dad was also friends with my friends. He was one of the lads.” In the weeks before he died in January 2025, Barry’s father asked if his ashes could be used in his son’s next tour. Barry agreed, and his father’s story is woven into his current show.

“His ashes are on stage with us, and I feel like it’s helping me to grieve him,” he says. “But I don’t want to make the show sound sad or heavy. It’s not.

People tell me it’s brought them joy and hope.” Neither of Barry’s parents expected him to make magic his career. They insisted he go to college to qualify in a more secure profession. “I did an aptitude test in sixth year to help me decide on a course and the results suggested I veer away from science,” he says.

That warning triggered Barry’s inner rebel and he put science at the top of his CAO form. He left home at 18 to study science in Galway, feeling “nervous but ready to experience life outside of Waterford”. He went on to disprove the unreliability of aptitude tests when he scored the highest marks in his final-year exams.

“But I still loved magic and was still table-hopping in The Wine Vault in the summers,” he says. “I was considering doing a PhD in chemistry but I knew I’d regret not trying to become a professional magician. So I didn’t do the PhD and instead found a job as a cosmetic scientist in Dublin and tried to infiltrate Dublin’s nightlife.” He was in his early 20s when he became a regular fixture in The Kitchen, the nightclub U2 had in Temple Bar in the 1990s.

“I’d perform in the VIP area every Friday, which got me known in Dublin,” he says. “I haven’t looked back since.” Visit keithbarry.com for details of his Unhinged tour, which runs in venues nationwide until November 29.