The Traitors Ireland is "like football – when you put different players in, you get a different game"

As the nation retires to its couches and televisions, now that the grand stretchy evenings of summer ‘26 are officially behind us, office chat, dinnertime discourse and small talk in general is being dominated by the lives (and lies) of a few dozen strangers in Slane Castle once again – with The Traitors Ireland back on RTÉ One for a second series.

Centred around a game of trust and deception, last year’s series – the first Irish edition of the international franchise – not only made a star out of retired prison officer Paudie Moloney, but drew an average of 557,000 viewers per episode, and was streamed nearly four million times on the RTÉ Player. Now – with a new batch of faithfuls and traitors in the castle, vying for a prize pot of up to €50,000 – it remains to be seen if host Siobhán McSweeney, the majestic wolfhounds, and the rest of the Traitors Ireland team can strike TV gold for a second time, as the competition intensifies over the days and weeks head.

But, while dodging cameras during a mid-production visit to the set in Slane, producer Darren Smith assures us that he and his team at Kite Entertainment didn't set out to completely replicate the first season.

“We had over 120 prison guards apply to be on the show this year,” he reveals. “And they were all age ranges – they weren’t all Paudie types. We also had some brilliant older guys apply, and, in a heartbeat, you’d put them in any show. But it would just feel a bit try-hard, like we were looking for another Paudie.”

With a different cast, he says, comes a “different energy.”

“Traitors is like sport,” Darren reflects. “It’s like football. When you put different players in, you get a different game.”

Siobhán McSweeney feels the team have “cast incredibly well this year.”

“I thought I would be trying to look for the Paudies and the Andrews,” she smiles. “But you don’t feel like you’re getting a supermarket own-brand Diane or something – you’re getting a completely different gang, with a completely different dynamic, and a completely different way of working with each other.”

Siobhán – who won a BAFTA in 2023 for her iconic role as Sister Michael in Derry Girls – notes she’s “not a presenter”, and as such, she doesn’t approach The Traitors Ireland like a traditional presenting job. Instead, she’s crafted an entirely separate character, who she affectionately refers to as “Lady Muck”.

While she finds that the reaction to the show has been “extraordinary”, she admits that it wasn’t until her own family were watching the series that she realised it was such a hit.

“My brother doesn’t like to watch anything I’m in, because he finds it a bit weird,” she laughs. “He’s like, ‘It’s just you pretending…’ It’s called acting, actually! But with this, he really loved it.

“And I was hearing stories about people, friends of mine, saying that they were sitting down with their kids, and using it as event TV. That’s when I knew something was up.”

As an actor, Siobhán notes that costume is also “hugely important” to her.

“There’s three things I like to work with, with the costume, and with wardrobe,” she remarks. “I like to focus primarily on Irish designers, and up-and-coming designers – who I think deserve a little bit of a spotlight on them. Also sustainability – I like to reuse a lot of stuff again. You’ll see a lot of pieces that I wore last year, but styled in a different way.

“And thirdly, I won’t work with anyone or anything that doesn’t regard my size as a normal size, and not an anomaly. That’s not going to change. Even though my size may change, that attitude won’t.”

Also key to magic of The Traitors Ireland is the setting, at Slane Castle in Co. Meath.

“I absolutely love Slane Castle,” Siobhán enthuses. “I suit it very well. So I’ve told them I might not be leaving…

“What’s really nice about this year is that we’re getting to use a lot of locations in the area, to expand our geographical reach – because there are so many.”

Before shooting the first season, Darren reveals the team were “about two or three days away from signing to a different location.”

“Out of the blue, we got an email from Alex [Conyngham of Slane Castle],” he resumes. “The team got quite excited, and they rang me – and I went, ‘We won’t be able to afford it. Don’t waste your time.’ And they said, ‘Well, he wants us to come down and show us around.’ They instantly fell in love with the place, and the round-table room worked – he had a room big enough. Where we were [originally planning on] going, we were going to have to build a spiegeltent, and put the round room outdoors, and we had weather concerns about that.

“So Alex and Slane have been amazing since then… And we have them signed up for year three.”

The Traitors Ireland has also been praised for its spontaneous and organic use of the Irish language.

“My Irish side of the family are Gaeilgeoirs,” Siobhán tells us. “Mac Suibhne is from the Gaeltacht in Cúil Aodha. My grandad was a poet in the Irish language, An Suibhneach Meann, and he set up the first dámhscoil, in Mhúscraí, and was very involved in the Irish language revival. So that is a very proud heritage.

“I, on the other hand, have fuck all Irish,” she laughs. “Because I’m a product of our educational system here. But what is deeply moving is the response to those cúpla focal that we had. I think it’s a real evolution of our guilt, and our psychological trauma we have from our colonial past, that we can move on and begin to embrace the language as a sort of neutral language, and a language that is ours – without this historical trauma to bring with us.

“This year we’ve really embraced that, and we have contestants who spontaneously bring that to the table every single night. A wonderful thing about the show is that we seem to be reflecting what’s happening in Irish society at the moment, in that there is a huge resurgence in the Irish language – which, certainly in my 48 years, is new. It’s beautiful to see.”

As for the second series, Siobhán acknowledges that there is a bit of a “second album feeling,” following the phenomenal success of last year’s edition.

“I don’t know how it’ll go down, but I do know that we’re working as hard, if not harder, and we have an amazing cast.

“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it’s also great fun,” she adds. “The response to it is a lovely aspect – but I’m long enough in the tooth to know that you can’t count on it. But it would be lovely, if there was even an iota of the same response as we had last year.”

• The Traitors Ireland continues every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player.