From Kenny’s Kids to Ireland Radar – Ronan Calvert is a former UL student now running “the home of everything Irish football”
If you are a fan of Irish international football or the League of Ireland then it’s likely you have already heard of Ireland Radar, or what some might call “the artist formerly known as Kenny’s Kids” on X.
If you know you know, but for those of you that don’t – Ireland Radar was initially created as “Kenny’s Kids” back in 2018, with the aim of creating awareness and highlighting every time an Irish football player anywhere in the world starts a game, scores a goal, assists a goal, makes a debut, gets sent off – all of the above.
The page grew a rapid following and in 2021 a takeover of sorts was completed when Kenny’s Kids officially changed ownership, before undergoing a rebrand in 2023 when it was relaunched as “Ireland Radar” and the home of “Everything Irish Football”.
Limerick Voice spoke with Ronan Calvert, freelance journalist and owner of Ireland Radar which has since expanded beyond the realms of X/Twitter to a brand-new website and a new weekly podcast covering all things Irish football.
Ronan’s background
“Since I was about 10 or 12 years of age I kind of already had an interest in sports journalism. So, while at the moment I’m doing Ireland Radar and doing some freelance work across the Irish sports media space (I worked with SportsJoe over the weekend for example) – I’ve been kind of honing my skills for a long time in terms of setting up my own Munster Rugby page, and I kind of created a website from there just to give myself some writing experience.
I decided to do Arts in UL as a result (English and Economics) but always kept a foot in media the whole time and that was important. ExtraTime.eu let me write for them when I was in first year, I applied for an opening with Kenny’s Kids in Pundit Arena in second year, thankfully got that, and that kind of brings us up to speed to where we are today, that’s basically my background.”
Initial takeover of Kenny’s Kids
“I almost regretted not going down the journalism route in some ways, like I wanted to keep going, and I missed what I did in terms of rugby writing etc. I think it was just before lockdown, I was working in Fine Wines off-licence as a part-time job at the time but I wanted to get some kind of paid media work. So what happened with Kenny’s kids was, Kevin Higgins the original owner decided to pursue other opportunities, and asked if anyone out there wanted to take over the page with any kind of media experience.
I sent him a fairly long message explaining why it might be me, little did I know then that Pundit Arena were involved, Pundit Arena got me on the call, we talked it through and yeah thankfully that’s how it started”.
Fast forward to 2023 – Kenny’s Kids undergoes a rebrand to Ireland Radar
“I mean, it was kind of decided for us in some ways, but it wasn’t until the very last days of Stephen Kenny’s time as Ireland manager that it changed. Everyone knew we were going to have to at some stage anyway, but I like most Irish fans really wanted it to work out with Stephen Kenny – that was a big part of what I really loved about the page, it wasn’t just the media side of it, it was genuinely kind of having a bit of investment and hope for Irish football.
I still do like agree with everything he really wanted to do and what he was looking for, and with St. Pat’s now in the League of Ireland he’s done a fantastic job, he definitely has something special and maybe it was the wrong time – he just lost too many matches at that stage for it to be viable for him to continue”.
Ireland Radar website and podcast
We have a plan to launch a separate League of Ireland podcast, which I wasn’t certain on for a while but I think that the audiences are slightly different and a lot of people who listen to the Ireland Radar podcast really liked the Kenny’s Kids content which was focusing a lot on Irish underage players rather than League of Ireland. So I think we’re going to start a separate League of Ireland one because I completely agree – where the League of Ireland is at now, it’s grown so much in the last few years and 40,000 at the FAI Cup Final is really good. Also, in terms of being a journalist as well, having matches to write about every weekend and actually having storylines is great – when you’re just tracking players abroad, it’s a bit different. So to be following the League of Ireland narrative lends itself better to reporting on Irish Football.
Is there any particular Irish player who you can say (with confidence) that “you saw him/her first”?
“I think the main one would be Andrew Moran who got his first Ireland call-up this week. He probably came across my desk when he was around 16 or 17 with Brighton’s U18’s, it wasn’t long before they had him in the U21 side after a few games. He was with Bray Wanderers before that, I think he made his debut in the League of Ireland as a 15-year-old so a really impressive breakthrough from him. He’s very exciting to watch, he’s with Stoke on loan at the moment and I think he has potential to go on and play for a Premier League club, at Brighton hopefully where he’s contracted but if not, he’s still such a good player to watch and the attributes he has would make him really important to Ireland no matter what”.
The future of Ireland Radar – what’s next?
“I think the big thing for us is building back the momentum we had previously on X. I did take a little break while doing a Masters degree last year but we probably need to get back into the swing of things on Twitter to fully capture the imagination again – increasing and improving the quality of content we’re putting out on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok etc. I think that the decision to go towards podcasting means we can easily turn audio content into visual content and caption it over reels and stuff. That’s kind of what you have to do to get a lot of people to recognize you but if that’s what gets people to know the podcast then they’ll come to Spotify and see the good work we put in there and that’s what we’re proud of. Then we’ll have regular tweets and articles around international breaks, you’re getting a pretty kind of full package there then so that’s where I’d like to go with it and I think as more time goes by, the more success it’ll have hopefully”.
To find more information and enjoy the great content from Ronan and the team, search @IrelandRadar across all social media platforms, follow the Ireland Radar Podcast and check out IrelandRadar.com, home of everything Irish football.