Barry Keoghan: ‘Of Course I’ve Got Trust Issues From Being In Foster Care’

The 32 year old has spoken about his difficult upbringing a few times over the years, but it was on an episode Louis Theroux’s podcast - released today - that Barry really opened up about being raised in foster care.

With his mum struggling to raise him due to her struggles with a heroin addiction and his father not being a part of his life, from the age of five until nine when he went to live with his granny, Barry Keoghan lived in 13 different foster homes – all of which he called ‘incredible’ - with his brother Eric.

‘My mum was lovely, she was gorgeous. Almost 6ft, dark hair, just beautiful. Every lad was chasing her and this thing got her like so many families.’

He continued, ‘She was just unable to look after us. She did try. And there was a whole process of her being evaluated and on weekends she got visits to us.

‘My father wasn’t there and she just couldn’t look after us, so we got taken into care. And no one knew about this. I think she was too embarrassed to tell my granny so no one knew.

‘She’d be allowed to visit us on Saturdays and sometimes she wouldn’t be there, she wouldn’t make it. It’s those things that kind of haunt me still. You don’t forget those things, you don’t forget waiting on the social worker’s steps for the new family to come and play with you in the playground and see if it’s going to work and you go with them to a whole new area and a whole new home.’

Barry was also incredibly open in the interview about the impact that being raised in foster care had had on him, especially since becoming a father to Brando – with his ex-girlfriend Alyson Kierans – in 2022.

Speaking about the comments online which call him an ‘absent father’ and far worse, Barry said, ‘People have a judgement on me as a parent. Until you’ve walked a day in my shoes, growing up as I did, then you can comment.

‘Of course it’s going to affect me as a father when I didn’t have a blueprint to take from.’

He continued, ‘I’m not an absent father. People love to use my son as ammunition. The more attention I’ve got lately and the more in the public eye I’ve become, the less I’ve posted about my child because I don’t think it’s fair to put my child online.

‘And because I reigned that it, people draw their own narrative and call me an absent father.’

He concluded, ‘I’ve got certain trust issues and again it’s poster boy, coming from where I come from. When you see and go through that experience, how can you trust anything? When you get attached to a family and then have to go somewhere else.

‘I never trusted it when someone said they loved me, I never trusted the process. I’d always think, "This isn’t real". I’m very aware of it now and I’m getting around to it through therapy, but trust is a massive thing.’

Daisy Hall is a News and Entertainment writer on Grazia