Niall Watters is hoping his Carlichauns brand, which taps into Irish leprechaun folklore, will be a global children’s hit. He talks to George Morahan about how the idea came about and outlines his plan to create an online and broadcast smash

In early 2022, Niall Watters and Stephen Woods identified an opportunity to create a pre-school children’s entertainment brand with the knowledge of Woods’s father, Kevin, who is known as the last leprechaun whisperer in Ireland.

Kevin Woods runs the Carlingford Leprechaun and Fairy Cavern, a folklore park in Co Louth that attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year.

Carlichauns is the vehicle intended to make good on that opportunity with plans for an animated television series, YouTube content, digital books, games and merchandise based on a cast of diverse leprechaun characters known as the Carlichauns.

“The pitch to Kevin was that he’s already seen the interest in Irish folklore and mythology and cultural elements over the past 36 years.

“We thought, given that the leprechaun has been portrayed in certain ways for the last couple of hundred years — it’s very stereotypical — there’s an opportunity here to actually make that kids- and family-friendly,” Watters says.

The company has five co-founders, including Tim Patterson, ex-commissioner for Nickelodeon UK & Ireland and formerly of the BBC and Disney, and Eoin McCormack, former managing director of Musgrave, in addition to Watters and the Woodses.

The co-founders initially invested €200,000 of their own money when the company was registered in early 2023.

After making a loss of €162,700 in its first year of operation, the firm has just closed a €750,000 seed funding round, with €500,000 from angel investors and €250,000 from the Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start-Up fund.

The angel investors are from a mix of backgrounds, including media and entertainment, retail and education, and split evenly between North America and Ireland.

Dan Mulhall, a former ambassador to the US and a lecturer in Celtic Studies at Harvard and NYU, has joined Carlichauns as an ambassador.

So has Bob the Builder and PAW Patrol creator Keith Chapman, who will serve as an executive producer on the planned television series.

“His track record is that he’s already built two billion-dollar brands, and he’s aiming for a hat-trick,” Watters says of Chapman.

The new capital raised will be used for content production and product development as well as company expansion.

Watters says there are plans to increase its headcount from two staff at present (himself and Patterson), and bring in additional expertise on a full-time basis.

Development work on the animated characters has been “more or less” completed, and any future adjustments to the animation assets and character designs will be “minor”.

The company has already uploaded some content to YouTube and social media, introducing the characters, the setting and teasing the pending series.

Last March, the company launched the Carlichauns Adventure Trail, a mobile app that allowed children at a few locations in Ireland and Los Angeles to search for the Carlichauns and have their picture taken with them using augmented reality.

The firm will soon launch Carlichauns digital books for sale on Amazon, and Watters has also received the heads of terms from a licensing agent for future merchandise ranges (“t-shirts, school bags, etc”), which is rare for an untested brand.

Discussions on the terms of a contract with an Irish-based animation studio to produce the television series are ongoing, but production is expected to commence in the first quarter of this year.

Carlichauns is aiming to broadcast the series internationally in 2026.

It has received interest from broadcasters and streamers in a number of different territories, having had “fruitful meetings” with prospective partners as part of the Ireland on Screen delegation at October’s MIPCOM television trade show in Cannes.

“Obviously we’re looking to, over the course of 2025, broaden those relationships and continue discussions with the international players on that front,” Watters says.

He concedes it is a difficult time for broadcasters, with advertising spend and viewing figures fluctuating and budgets being curbed.

Production of the series will be fully funded by Carlichauns, though, allowing the company to retain control of the property while reducing costs for broadcast partners.

“Typically, what happens in this industry, is you might go with an idea, a script and a couple of designs. The hope is that a broadcaster might sponsor you and put money behind it, and you have to go and find the rest,” Watters says.

“It can take several years to really get a project off the ground, whereas the approach we’re taking is that we’re going to build first here, and at the right time, we will engage properly with the broadcasters, with a view to them licensing our content.”

Based in Dublin, Watters has ambitions of capturing an audience far greater than the Irish diaspora with Carlichauns.

His company’s stated mission is to become the most-watched and most-loved kids and family entertainment brand by 2030.

“The Irish abroad is an immediate addressable market, but we’re going much beyond that. That’s clear in terms of our creations and content design.

“The characters diverge in terms of colour, gender, size and skill sets,” Watters says. “From our early research and discussions with major partners in the space, we believe that our product and approach is very different to our competitors in terms of what our story represents, being digital-first, and our strategy for building community and brand awareness.

“And then what we have seen from our early research, insofar as the app and the Adventure Trail launching, is that this is resonating with an international audience.”

The Carlichauns Adventure Trail app has been used by 21 different nationalities and has an average rating of 4.9 on the App Store.

Watters, who appears over Zoom sporting a black polo shirt and neatly styled brown hair, has a varied business background taking in financial analysis, engineering and management consulting.

He studied International Business with Spanish — he also speaks Portuguese and Irish — at Queen’s University Belfast, and worked for a number of years with McNulty Performance led by Enda McNulty, a leading performance psychologist, to create leadership development and wellbeing programmes for client companies.

He later founded DigitalWellbeing.ie and developed diagnostic frameworks for schools, universities, businesses and sports teams to teach them how to better manage their technology habits and improve performance and productivity.

DigitalWellbeing.ie merged with US boutique management consultancy MKN Advisory in 2022, and Watters juggled working for MKN with Carlichauns before going full-time with the company earlier this year.

While he doesn’t have experience of media and entertainment or animation, the Culloville, Co Armagh native has surrounded himself with enviable expertise.

He has a clear vision: to combine Kevin Woods’s deep knowledge of the folklore with the children’s television know-how and connections of Patterson and Chapman to create omnichannel Carlichauns content, and then monetise the intellectual property.

“We’re bringing together a team of experts,” he says. “Kevin is the expert in terms of what he’s built over the last 36 years, being the last leprechaun whisperer, an incredible storyteller.

“Tim Patterson has been on the broadcaster side, the buyer side and the commissioner side, so he knows what works and doesn’t work.

“Keith Chapman, then, has created two billion-dollar brands in our space.

“It’s putting those people together in a room alongside a really strong production partner with a view to creating world-class content.”

Photo: Niall Watters