Rita Kirwan is the Marketing Director at Aldi and oversees the brand’s sporting partnerships.

She described herself as well this year as Kevin the Carrot’s and Gilbert the Grape’s boss, a reference to the popularity of the TV ad featuring Aldi’s well-known characters together with Paul O’Connell and James Ryan ahead of this year’s Rugby World Cup.

Kirwan joined Aldi in 2015, the year before the vegetable characters made their debut.

Before joining Aldi, she had been the Brand Communications and Sponsorship Director at O2 where she was also closely associated with Rugby and oversaw the #Thirteen campaign around Brian O’Driscoll’s retirement, seen at the time as a breakthrough in digital marketing.

She spent five years in the United States in the drinks industry with Irish Distillers and was also the Marketing Director for Tayto at Largo Foods.

During her time to date at Aldi, she has been responsible for the brand partnership with the IRFU and with Community Games Ireland.

See who else has been named on the list alongside Rita Kirwan by clicking on the image below.

 

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See who else has been included so far on the list for 2023

 

 

This is the 11th edition of our Sport for Business listing of 50 Women of Influence in Irish Sport.

Read more about the list and nominate who you think should be a part of it in 2023.

We are proud to publish the list in partnership with AIG, an organisation that has pledged its commitment to equality in its partnerships with Gaelic Games, Tennis, Golf, and more, for whom “Effort is Equal” and with whom we have ambitious plans to extend the reach of this annual celebration of the Women who are making a difference.

This year’s list will be drawn as before from the worlds of leadership, partnership, storytelling, and performance.

We began this journey in 2013 when challenged that we would never be able to produce a list of twenty Influential Women in Irish Sport. The 20 stretched to 30, then 40 and 50 and it still does not do justice to the talent that is out there.

This year once more, to keep things fresh we will step up again, raising the number of new entrants to at least 40 percent of fresh names from last year.

It will be the hardest part to have some names replaced but if it was too easy it would be of less value.

The list we will build over the coming weeks is a snapshot of those women who are making a mark on how sport is played, consumed, grown, and delivered.

They are part of making the role of women in sport unexceptional by being exceptional in what they do.Â