Ray D'Arcy has responded to angry listeners after one segment on Monday covering the topic of female health sparked outrage among some.
The radio host spoke with the founders of ‘We Are Riley’ - an online company supplying period products by post - to discuss the stigma attached to talking about periods.
He opened the show this afternoon explaining that: “We spoke to three women from an all-female health company yesterday, We Are Riley, who supply Riley period products online - we spoke to the founders, Lauren, Aine and Fiona.”
He said in this day and age, he would have assumed the stigma around women’s periods and discussing them publicly would be long gone, but responses from some listeners disproved this.
“We discussed periods and the stigma around talking about them over the years and I would have thought that the stigma was gone in 2022,” he said, “but people got in touch with the show and some weren’t happy to hear the conversation about periods on the airwaves.”
D'Arcy explained that they ran out of time on the show yesterday and so they weren't able to voice people’s complaints, so today he read out a number of the messages sent in.
One woman in Galway said: “We don’t speak openly, or on radio, about for instance our bowel movements, so why must we listen to all this talk about periods? Furthermore, the entire population has bowel movements and a small majority have periods so many of us are just not interested.”
To which Ray said: “Well half the population will have periods at some stage of their life, that’s a scientific fact.”
Another person wrote: “Periods are a personal and private matter and people should not be forced to have conversations about periods shoved down their necks.”
One listener even accused D'Arcy of promoting ‘female fascism’ on the show after the segment, and he responded by saying “my word, now I’m part of female fascism?”
