Last night on the Tommy Tiernan Show, Rubberbandits star Blindboy Boatclub joined Tommy on the stage to discuss the state of mental health in Ireland. The host praised his surprise guest for his "amazing passion" and "concern about the country". 

Blindboy has been an advocate for mental health in Ireland for many years now and has spoken openly about his own experience with anxiety and agoraphobia on his podcast, The Blindboy Podcast.

Watch the full interview here on the RTÉ Player.

Recently, Blindboy and his fellow bandit Mr Chrome released a song called Sonny which speaks on the high suicide rates of men under 30 in Ireland.

Warning: This video contains explicit language, which some viewers may find offensive.

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Last year on RTÉ Radio 1, Blindboy joined Ryan Tubridy in studio to discuss mental health - listen to the interview above.

He engages CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) techniques to keep them in check and after ten years of keeping himself in a balanced and happy place, he just sees this as part of his daily routine.

"It’s like I’ve got a garden and I’m just tending it all the time. I don’t let it grow over and then have to go out there with a chainsaw. 

"I’d never allow myself to do that because that would be a cyclical thing and a lot of people I talk to can end up in that way.

"They get on grand, then they have a huge big long period of not grand, and then they’re back to grand again.

"I pick away at it every single day and it keeps me at level happiness I think."

Elsewhere in the life of Blindboy, he has recently become a podcast king, and his 80,000 strong listener-ship has catapulted him to the number one spot on the podcast charts. What's next for the plastic bag enthusiast?

"I’m going to continue the podcast perpetually and I’m making preparations for writing a second book which I can’t wait to get down to."

The second book will follow, Blindboy's most recent release, a collection of short stories entitled The Gospel According to Blindboy which he describes as having been an "absolute pleasure" to write.

"The words just flew out of the page with me. I’ve got a technique of writing called ‘flow’ which I’ve developed over many years. 

"It’s an unfettered access to my unconscious mind where the words just flow from me and then I end up with the bones of the story on the page.

"Then 30% of the rest of the work is editing it in a kind of a cognitive fashion."

Fans can definitely expect the weird, wild and wonderful to be waiting for them between the covers and Blindboy urges readers to let the stories wash over them, rather than trying to rationalise them too much.

"Good writing comes from the same place that good dreams come from except it’s a bit more structured…

"With my short stories, treat it like a dream, whether it made sense or not. Just say, I just had a weird short story, the way you say, I just had a weird dream."

You can listen to the RTÉ Radio 1 interview in full in the video above.