Ronan Flanagan grew up on the Frenchpark Road in Boyle and now reads the news to the north west. He is a broadcast journalist with Ocean FM, covering news, sport, farming and current affairs across County Sligo, North Leitrim and South Donegal, and he has commentated on Sligo Rovers matches for the station and for LOI TV. He sat down with Carlo to talk about school days in Boyle, a lifelong love of the Irish language, the reality of a local newsroom, and why nothing will ever beat sitting across a table from someone.

From the Frenchpark Road to the newsroom

Ronan was born in 1999 and grew up on the Frenchpark Road in Boyle. He went to the convent school, then the boys school, then on to Abbey Community College, and by his own account he got a lot out of all of it. Small classes, a group of friends who stayed together from primary into secondary, plenty of sport, and a school experience he describes as a positive one.

One subject stood out from very early on. Ronan has loved Irish since he was four or five years old, which he admits might be a slightly controversial favourite. What made the difference was teaching. A teacher in fifth class kept the language conversational rather than exam shaped, and one of his methods has stayed with Ronan ever since: a burst football passed around the room on a Monday morning, with a question attached to it. What did you do at the weekend? The answers turned into conversation, and conversation turned into fluency.

“He had a real emphasis on oral Irish, and speaking the language. What he did was he made the language fun.”

That love of the spoken word took him to Galway, where he spent four years on a communications degree delivered entirely through Irish. The modules ranged across radio broadcasting, radio production, television production and feature writing, alongside subjects like the history of place names and local areas, which suited his interests neatly. Irish poetry, he says with some honesty, suited him less.

How Ocean FM happened

COVID rearranged the degree. Ronan’s year ended up doing their final year first, from home, before heading to the Connemara Gaeltacht from September to December 2021 and out on work placement from January 2022. He had long been interested in the work Ocean FM was doing, had spent a few weeks there previously, and had a contact at the station. He asked, they said yes, and he stayed on afterwards picking up freelance shifts.

Then, while he was weighing up whether to look for work or go back to study, the station’s chief executive rang and offered him a job. He took it. He has been there since September 2022.

What a local news day actually looks like

Ronan covers news, sport, farming and current affairs, and he says the thread running through all three is the same: talking to the regular person. The patch is a big one. Ocean FM’s franchise area takes in the whole of County Sligo, North Leitrim up towards Tullaghan, and South Donegal as far as the Barnesmore Gap. It is a genuinely varied stretch of country. Someone in Ballinafad, where agriculture dominates, will not necessarily have the same priorities as someone in Killybegs, where fishing and marine industry do.

A day starts with emails and press releases, moves through the national papers, and takes in the local publications as well. But the core of the job is generating the local story. When fuel prices jumped, the station received clips from Dublin. Useful, but not quite the point.

“Our listener doesn’t really want to know what someone from Dublin thinks. Do they really?”

So the job becomes finding a local shop owner, a petrol station owner, a community representative, and asking how it lands here. Hospital overcrowding is a national story until you ask what it means for Sligo University Hospital or for Letterkenny, and then it is a local one.

He is straight about the difficult parts. Hourly bulletin deadlines are unforgiving. Building a contacts book took the guts of two years. And every single day there is the plain problem of people not answering the phone, which means always having the next name ready. What he will not accept is the idea that any of it weighs on him.

“It’s a privilege to be able to cover the stories that matter to people.”

A Sligo Rovers fanatic behind the microphone

Ronan grew up in a house that was sport mad, and he found his own way into it. His first commentary came through the work placement, when the station was short for a Tuesday night home game against Bohemians in 2022. Rovers lost one nil. He describes it as a great old experience, and he has done games since for Ocean FM and for the streaming platform LOI TV. What keeps him at it is the adrenaline of calling live action.

He is also involved in the Bit O’Red Supporters Trust, a fan group that fundraises for a club with no owner and nobody pumping money in. Quizzes, fundraisers, a coffee dock at the Showgrounds on match nights. Ronan hosts the trust’s weekly podcast during the season with a few other supporters, which made sitting on the other side of the microphone with Carlo a slightly strange experience.

Sligo Rovers is the only fully supporter owned club in the League of Ireland, and the Showgrounds can never be sold, thanks to forms signed by trustees back in the nineteen fifties. Ronan is clear about what that means to him. Wins are great, defeats happen, but the belonging is the thing.

“It’s run by the community for the community.”

Where local journalism goes next

Ronan is realistic about how the ground is shifting. Social media, and Facebook community pages in particular, will very often have a local story before a bulletin does. He can see a future where local stations sit under a single national ownership umbrella, running shared programming through the middle of the day with localised news bulletins dropped in around it, much like BBC local radio in the UK. He does not pretend to know exactly how it plays out.

Podcasts are part of the picture too. He points to pocket podcasts, five to fifteen minute news round ups made for a lunch break or a commute home, as one of the ways stations are meeting people where they are. Artificial intelligence is the part that unsettles him. The job, as he sees it, is grinding something down until it is nailed on, and it is a strange thing to watch that be replaced with the flick of a switch.

The art of conversation

The last stretch of the episode is the part that will land hardest with anyone from a small town. Ronan and Carlo talk about rambling houses, about grandparents who thought nothing of calling up and putting on the kettle, and about how rare that has become. Nobody calls to a house unannounced now. We text first to ask if it is alright to ring.

Ronan will not claim to be above it. He works in an industry built on social media reach and website traffic, and he says so. But he keeps coming back to the same point.

“You can’t beat meeting people.”

Carlo, near the end, asked Ronan to hit him straight between the eyes with one piece of advice he could work on. The answer came back in four words: know your listener. And then a fifth thought, which might be the better half of it. Appreciate your listener, because they are the most important thing.